21st century computer architecture

Abstract

This talk has two parts. The first part will discuss possible directions for computer architecture research, including architecture as infrastructure, energy first, impact of new technologies, and cross-layer opportunities. This part is based on a 2012 Computing Community Consortium (CCC) whitepaper effort led by Hill, as well as other recent National Academy and ISAT studies. See: http://cra.org/ccc/docs/init/21stcenturyarchitecturewhitepaper.pdf. The second part of the talk will discuss one or more exam-ples of cross-layer research advocated in the first part. For example, our analysis shows that many "big-memory" server workloads, such as databases, in-memory caches, and graph analytics, pay a high cost for page-based virtual memory: up to 50% of execution time wasted. Via small changes to the operating system (Linux) and hardware (x86-64 MMU), this work reduces execution time these workloads waste to less than 0.5%. The key idea is to map part of a process's linear virtual address space with a new incarnation of segmentation, while providing compatibility by mapping the rest of the virtual address space with pag-ing.