ECIT PhD Researcher recognised in ACM Student Research Competition sponsored by Microsoft
Konstantinos Tovletoglou,a PhD student at the Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology (ECIT) at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) won a Bronze Award at the ACM student research competition at the IEEE International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT).
The ACM Student Research Competition (SRC), sponsored by Microsoft, offers a unique forum for undergraduate and graduate students to present their original research before a panel of judges and attendees at top-tier international ACM-sponsored and co-sponsored conferences.
Konstantinos, who was supervised by Georgios Karakonstantis and Dimitrios Nikolopoulos, successfully passed through the 3 rounds of the competition and won the Bronze Award for his project entitled "Implementation of a Heterogeneous-Reliability Memory Framework".
The project implemented a unique heterogeneous memory framework on a commodity ARM based server with a fully-fledged Linux Operating System, addressing the practical limitations neglected by prior works. The implemented framework enables splitting of main memory/DRAM into multiple domains with varying power/reliability and allocation of data depending on their criticality. The work revealed that the implementation of the heterogeneous-reliability memory framework requires disabling of the hardware memory interleaving, which results in a significant degradation of the system performance. To limit the induced performance loss, a software-based interleaving was developed and evaluated. The experimental results, based on the evaluation of 35 benchmarks, show that the framework introduces a minor 6% performance overhead, while reducing the average DRAM power by 19.9%, when memory operates under relaxed refresh rate and lowered supply voltage.
More details about the team's work can be found in the paper recently published on January 2019 in the IEEE Computer Architecture Letters (CAL), entitled "Shimmer: Implementing a Heterogeneous-Reliability DRAM Framework on a Commodity Server".
Georgios Karakonstantis, Lecturer at ECIT, commented: “I would like to extend my congratulations to Konstantinos on his excellent award and to the entire team for the recent publication in CAL. It is a great motivator to have our research recognised by external bodies. We look forward to progressing our work in such a cutting-edge field.”
The research was performed as part of the EU Horizon 2020 Uniserver project, a €4.8M research grant that is coordinated by Georgios Karakonstantis.
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For more information contact Helen McCrory - H.McCrory@qub.ac.uk