Paper Info
Title
COP: to compress and protect main memory
Abstract
Protecting main memories from soft errors typically requires special dual-inline memory modules (DIMMs) which incorporate at least one extra chip per rank to store error-correcting codes (ECC). This increases the cost of the DIMM as well as its power consumption. To avoid these costs, some proposals have suggested protecting non-ECC DIMMs by allocating a portion of memory space to store ECC metadata. However, such proposals can significantly shrink the available memory space while degrading performance due to extra memory accesses. In this work, we propose a technique called COP which uses block-level compression to make room for ECC check bits in DRAM. Because a compressed block with check bits is the same size as an uncompressed block, no extra memory accesses are required and the memory space is not reduced. Unlike other approaches that require explicit compression-tracking metadata, COP employs a novel mechanism that relies on ECC to detect compressed data. Our results show that COP can reduce the DRAM soft error rate by 93% with no storage overhead and negligible impact on performance. We also propose a technique using COP to protect both compressible and incompressible data with minimal storage and performance overheads.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1145/2749469.2750377
International Symposium on Computer Architecture
Keywords
Field
DocType
COP,memory compression,memory protection,dual-inline memory modules,DIMM,error-correcting codes,ECC metadata,block-level compression,DRAM
Registered memory,Memory scrubbing,DIMM,Interleaved memory,Soft error,Computer science,Parallel computing,Real-time computing,Memory management,Computer hardware,Memory controller,Memory rank
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
43
3S
0163-5964
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
14
0.52
16
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
David J. Palframan1683.90
Nam Sung Kim23268225.99
M. H. Lipasti31303110.38