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Automatic DRAM Subsystem Configuration with irace

Published: 13 April 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Nowadays, DRAM subsystem configuration includes a large number of parameters, resulting in an extensive design space. Setting these parameters is a challenging step in system design as the parameter-workload interactions are complex. Since design space exploration by exhaustive simulation is infeasible due to limited computing resources and development time, semi-automatic configuration involving both manual as well as simulation-based decisions is state-of-the-art. However, it requires a lot of expertise in the DRAM domain as well as application knowledge, and there is no guarantee for a good performance of the resulting subsystem. In this paper, we present a new framework that fully automatizes the DRAM subsystem configuration for a given parameter space and set of target applications. It is based on irace, a software package originally developed for automatic configuration of optimization algorithms. We show that the framework finds nearly-optimal configurations, while only a fraction of all application-configuration combinations has to be evaluated. In addition, all returned configurations perform better than a predefined standard configuration. Thus, our framework enables designers to automatically determine a suitable DRAM subsystem for their platform.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
RAPIDO '23: Proceedings of the DroneSE and RAPIDO: System Engineering for constrained embedded systems
January 2023
94 pages
ISBN:9798400700453
DOI:10.1145/3579170
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 13 April 2023

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Author Tags

  1. Automatic Algorithm Configuration
  2. DRAM
  3. Design Space Exploration
  4. irace

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  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

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  • German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)

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DroneSE and RAPIDO 2023

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Overall Acceptance Rate 14 of 28 submissions, 50%

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