Error-tolerant Stream Processing System Design (ESP-SD)
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Edinburgh
Department Name: Sch of Informatics
Abstract
Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.
Organisations
Publications
Asheim T
(2021)
BTB-X: A Storage-Effective BTB Organization
in IEEE Computer Architecture Letters
Faldu P
(2016)
LLC Dead Block Prediction Considered Not Useful
Gavrielatos V
(2018)
Scale-Out ccNUMA: Exploiting Skew with Strongly Consistent Caching
Huang C
(2016)
DCA: A DRAM-cache-Aware DRAM Controller
Joshi A
(2015)
Efficient persist barriers for multicores
Joshi A
(2018)
DHTM: Durable Hardware Transactional Memory
Joshi, A
(2015)
Efficient Persist Barriers for Multicores
Kocberber O
(2015)
Asynchronous memory access chaining
in Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment
| Description | (1) New non-volatile-memory technologies (such as Intel's new 3D Xpoint memory) which could potentially operate at the speed of DRAM offer the promise of low-overhead durability (persistence). But we discovered that new architectural primitives are needed in order to provide guarantees on what is made durable (otherwise memory can be in erroneous, inconsistent state). We have designed and implemented three new architectural primitives: a persist barrier (which provides ordering) and durable transactions (which provides atomic durability) and hardware support for ACID transactions. The three primitives efficiently stream updates to non-volatile memory in order to guarantee consistency without compromising performance. The three primitives have been published in top-tier international venues in computer architecture: MICRO 2015, HPCA 2017, and the third will appear this year at ISCA 2018. (2) Processing workloads such as server workloads may involve software having large instruction footprints with deep-layered software stacks that may have an active instruction working set comprising megabytes of instructions. The large instruction footprint and limited available cache capacity can result in a cache problem whereby many cache misses occur during execution, resulting in processing delays due to fetching instructions. Although a number of academic papers have proposed heavy-weight structures for remembering past instruction stream, none of them has been adopted by industry. We developed a lightweight technique to predict future accesses by repurposing the branch predictor for this purpose. We also designed a new branch target buffer (a structure that remembers the branch targets). In combination, these two structures have shown to be very effective in streaming control flow efficiently to a processor. These two works have been published in top-tier venues in computer architecture: HPCA 2017, and ASPLOS 2018. In addition, a patent has been filed. Talks are on with processor manufacturers, including Samsung and Intel, and they have shown interest in implementing these techniques in their processors. |
| Exploitation Route | (1) Non-volatile memory technologies (such as 3DXPoint memory) represent a significant disruption in computer systems: these memories can potentially operate as fast as DRAM, while being non-volatile. Our two proposed architectural primitives provide a low-level programming model and its efficient implementation which can be directly used by processor designers. In fact, this work was done in collaboration with Intel. (2) A number of processor manufacturers are attempting to solve the frontend bottleneck problem (the inability predict future instruction stream), and our proposed lightweight technique can be used by processor designers to solve this problem. |
| Sectors | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Electronics |
| Description | Please see the impact description provided for EP/M00113X/1 |
| Sector | Electronics |
| Impact Types | Societal,Economic |
| Description | Intel deprecating pcommit |
| Geographic Reach | Multiple continents/international |
| Policy Influence Type | Influenced training of practitioners or researchers |
| Impact | New memories that are non-volatlile (like disks), yet as fast as volatile memory are on the horizon. In collaboration with Intel, we lead the research on this disruptive new area, on how to integrate these new memories in computing systems. In early 2016, our team with collaborators from Intel made a case for making the memory controllers (the hardware interface to memory) persistent and disclosed this to Intel in April 2016. Intel released a public disclosure in September 2016 stating that Intel's memory controllers will in fact become persistent in future Intel architectures (https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2016/09/12/deprecate- pcommit-instruction). |
| URL | https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2016/09/12/deprecate-pcommit-instruction |
| Description | ARM Studentship |
| Amount | £63,584 (GBP) |
| Organisation | Arm Limited |
| Sector | Private |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 09/2016 |
| End | 08/2020 |
| Description | AWS Research Grant |
| Amount | $5,250 (USD) |
| Organisation | Amazon.com |
| Sector | Private |
| Country | United States |
| Start | 06/2015 |
| Description | Dijkstra's Pipe: Timing-Secure Processors by Design |
| Amount | £535,238 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | EP/V038699/1 |
| Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 11/2021 |
| End | 11/2024 |
| Description | Intel University Research Office |
| Amount | $95,000 (USD) |
| Organisation | Intel Corporation |
| Department | INTEL Research |
| Sector | Private |
| Country | United States |
| Start | 04/2013 |
| Title | BRANCH TARGET BUFFER ARRANGEMENT FOR INSTRUCTION PREFETCHING |
| Description | A branch target buffer, BTB, is provided to store at least one BTB entry corresponding to a respective branch in a control flow in a sequence of machine-readable instructions of a computer program. The BTB has a tag field to compare with a program counter of a fetch address generator and at least one further field to store information characteristic of the branch instruction identified by the corresponding tag field and allowing a conditional branch to be distinguished from an unconditional branch instruction. The BTB has a predetermined storage capacity and is utilized such that unconditional branch instructions are preferentially allocated storage space in the BTB relative to conditional branch instructions. |
| IP Reference | WO2019162647 |
| Protection | Patent application published |
| Year Protection Granted | 2019 |
| Licensed | No |
| Impact | This publication has already been cited by AMD. The associated publication has been cited by Intel among other academic publications. |
| Title | BRANCH TARGET BUFFER FOR A DATA PROCESSING APPARATUS |
| Description | Contemporary server workloads feature massive instruction footprints stemming from deep, layered software stacks. The active instruction working set of the entire stack can easily reach into megabytes, resulting in frequent frontend stalls due to instruction cache misses and pipeline flushes due to branch target buffer (BTB) misses. While a number of techniques have been proposed to address these problems, every one of them requires dedicated metadata structures, translating into significant sto |
| IP Reference | EP3577553 |
| Protection | Patent granted |
| Year Protection Granted | 2019 |
| Licensed | No |
| Impact | This patent has already been cited by ARM, Intel and AMD. |
| Description | 2017 ARM Faculty Summit talk |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | ARM, which makes processor chips and IoT products, hosted its annual research conference. The audience included international partners, developers and academics. The talk generated significant interest. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| URL | https://www.arm.com/company/events/research-summit |
| Description | ARM Research Summit (2016) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | Dr. Vijay Nagarajan was an invited speaker at the ARM Research Summit which attracted in excess of 100 delegates. The talk sparked questions and discussions and led to an ARM studentship in a related area. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | https://developer.arm.com/research/summit/previous-summits/2016 |
| Description | ARM research summit 2017 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | About 200 people attended the talk I gave at ARM which sparked off discussion. Now collaboration on the topic with ARM through a funded PhD student. The talk was picked by media insideHPC: https://insidehpc.com/2017/10/scaling-arm-architectures/ |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| URL | https://insidehpc.com/2017/10/scaling-arm-architectures/ |
| Description | EPCC Seminar |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Delivered an invited talk at Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, which triggered questions and discussions from academics and industrial practitioners. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | https://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/ |
| Description | Guest editor for IEEE Micro |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A magazine, newsletter or online publication |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Guested edited the Jan/Feb 2016 issue of IEEE Micro, a bimonthly publication of the IEEE Computer Society, which reaches an international audience of microcomputer and microprocessor designers, system integrators, and users. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | https://www.computer.org/web/computingnow/micro |
| Description | HP visit (Palo Alto) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | About 15 HP Labs employees attended the research talk. The talk lead to the start of a collaboration. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | HPCA 2017(Austin) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | We presented two papers at HPCA 2017 (co-located with CGO and PPoPP), a top-tier conference in computer architecture attend by around 500 people. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| URL | https://hpca2017.org/ |
| Description | Industry visit (ARM) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | Visited ARM Research, Cambridge to talk about ARM can benefit from our research and how future collaboration with ARM can be forged. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| Description | Intel research |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | 25 Intel researchers attended the talk, which sparked questions, discussions and possible future collaboration. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | Invited talk at ARM Research Summit |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Presented research outcomes stemming from the ESP-SD project to an audience of around 100 people. The audience consisted of scientists and industry representatives, with both researchers and engineers in the audience. The presentation sparked a lively discussion, and has led to an ongoing collaboration with a division within ARM. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | https://developer.arm.com/research/summit/previous-summits/2016 |
| Description | Memory model workshop (Uppsala) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Was invited to deliver a talk in this workshop which was attended by academics and industrial practitioners. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://user.it.uu.se/~mohat117/UpmarcWorkshop/ |
| Description | Micro 2016 conference (Taiwan) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Cheng-Chieh Huang presented our paper at this top-tier architecture conference, attended by around 250 delegates. This led to eventually Cheng-Chieh landing a job at Mentor Graphics. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | https://www.microarch.org/micro49/ |
| Description | Microarchitecture conference (USA) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The International Symposium on Microarchitecture is one of the premier conferences in computer architecture. This was an event attended by about 300 academics and industrial practitioners. We presented our paper in this prestigious conference which attracted questions and discussion from the top academic and industrial practitioners. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://www.microarch.org/micro48/ |
| Description | Organizer of Workshop on Warehouse Scale Memory Systems |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Organized a high-profile workshop co-located with the 23rd ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS). The workshop includes invited keynote and selected talks in areas directly related to the research covered by this grant. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| URL | http://workshops.inf.ed.ac.uk/wams/ |
| Description | Organizer of the Workshop on Near-Data Processing (WoNDP) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Organized the 3rd International Workshop on Near-Data Processing, co-located with the 48th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture. The workshop drew an international audience of academics, industry professionals and students. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://www.cs.utah.edu/wondp/ |
| Description | Organizer, 5th Workshop on Architectures and Systems for Big Data (ASBD) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Organized and chaired the program committee of the 5th Workshop on Architectures and Systems for Big Data (ASBD), held in conjunction with the 42nd International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA). The workshop was well attended by industry professionals, academics, and students. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://acs.ict.ac.cn/asbd2015/ |
| Description | Presentation at Samsung (Austin, USA) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Presented key research results of ESP-SD to an audience consisting of Samsung engineers, mid-level managers, and business people. The presentation sparked a long discussion and paved the way to an internship with an interested group at Samsung. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | Safecomp conference (Netherlands) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | We presented our paper at the SAFECOMP conference, which sparked interaction from academics and industry people working in the subject area. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://safecomp2015.tudelft.nl/ |
| Description | School Visit (Princeton) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Dr. Vijay Nagarajan delivered an invited presentation at Princeton university. About 20 academic staff and post-graduate students attended this talk, the talk sparked questions and discussions which lead to the exchange of papers and ideas between the research groups involved. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | School visit (IIT Madras, India) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | About 40 post-graduate students and academics attended our research talk, which sparked questions and opened future collaboration. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | http://www.cse.iitm.ac.in/ |
| Description | School visit (Imperial College London) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | About 30 people attended our research seminar at Imperial. Out talk sparked questions and discussion. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| Description | School visit (Michigan) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | 20 post-graduate students and faculty attended for a research visit to University of Michigan which sparked questions and discussion afterwards. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | School visit (Rutgers) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | 25 students and faculty attended the research visit to University of Rutgers, which sparked questions and discussions afterwards. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | School visit (U Penn) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Dr. Vijay Nagarajan delivered an invited lectuer at U Penn. This talk sparked questions and discussion with academic staff and post-graduate students afterwards. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | Seminar Series at Chinese Academy of Sciences |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Taught a series of 4 lectures at the Institute Of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy Of Sciences. The lectures covered research developed as part of this grant. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | Workshop: Numerical Algorithms and Intelligent Software |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Gave an invited talk at the Workshop: Numerical Algorithms and Intelligent Software, which sparked questions and discussions from academics and industrial practitioners. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~prichtar/NAIS2014/index.html |