H2M: Exploiting Heterogeneous Shared Memory Architectures

Over the past decades, the performance gap between the memory subsystem and compute capabilities continued to spread. However, scientific applications and simulations show increasing demand for both memory speed and capacity. To tackle these demands, new technologies such as high-bandwidth memory (HBM) or non-volatile memory (NVM) emerged, which are usually combined with classical DRAM. The resulting architecture is a heterogeneous memory system in which no single memory is “best”. HBM is smaller but offers higher bandwidth than DRAM, whereas NVM provides larger capacity than DRAM at a reasonable cost and less energy consumption. Despite that, in several cases, DRAM still offers the best latency out of all three technologies.