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AIoTC

Towards Sustainable and Fault-Tolerant Memory Systems in the Era of Scaling


  • 講者 : 陳耘志 博士
  • 日期 : 2024/12/06 (Fri.) 14:30~15:30
  • 地點 : 資創中心122演講廳、視訊
  • 邀請人 : 逄愛君主任
Abstract

Webex 會議連結
會議號: 2512 792 2137
密碼: aqJpvHJJ386

The reliability of DRAM and NAND flash memory declines as technology scales further. Manufacturers employ redundancy-heavy designs, frequent refresh cycles, and hardware-based ECC to maintain the illusion of fully reliable memory. While financially viable, these approaches ignore the significant carbon footprint of memory production and the operational energy consumption of these devices. In modern SoCs, the tight integration of logic and memory worsens the issue, as heat dissipation from compute units accelerates memory degradation. Memory chips are often prematurely decommissioned, even when much of their capacity remains usable. The retirement of memory often results in the decommissioning of entire SoCs, and their tight integration makes recycling difficult. The relentless pursuit of greater memory capacity and faster computation leads to huge environmental costs.


This talk advocates for rethinking how software interacts with memory. Instead of assuming fully reliable memory, we should embrace its physical instability and variability to ensure sustainability and move beyond the environmentally costly practices of the current memory economy. I will present techniques such as mixed-precision computing, iterative refinement, software-driven error correction, and adaptive data placement based on memory reliability and data lifetime. I will also discuss repurposing and recycling partially degraded memory to extend its lifecycle and deliver value from imperfect chips. By trading off precision for extended memory use, we can reduce the ongoing increase in e-waste and depletion of planet resources in our pursuit of more advanced computing.


 
Bio
Yun-Chih Chen is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Technical University of Dortmund, Germany. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Information Engineering from National Taiwan University in July 2023. His dissertation on storage optimization using application semantics received the prestigious Taiwan Information Storage Association Ph.D. Dissertation Award and the Synopsys Chung Laung Liu Ph.D. Fellowship. His work on Processing-in-NAND architecture earned the Best Paper Award at CODES+ISSS 2024.  Yun-Chih’s research focuses on designing cost-effective and fault-tolerant data storage systems.  His expertise includes hardware-software co-design and database systems. He has extensive expertise in SSD architecture and a proven record of industry collaboration. Currently, he is actively engaged in DFG-funded projects in Germany, working with researchers in database systems, communication, and system software.