Self-learnable Cluster-based Prefetching Method for DRAM-Flash Hybrid Main Memory Architecture

Abstract

This article presents a novel prefetching mechanism for memory-intensive workloads used in large-scale data centers. We design a negative-AND-flash/dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) hybrid memory architecture as a cost-effective memory architecture to resolve the scalability and power consumption problems of a DRAM-based model. A smart prefetching mechanism based on a cluster-management scheme to cope with dynamically varying and complex access patterns of any given application is designed for maximizing the performance of the DRAM. In this article, we propose a new concept for page management, called a cluster, which prefetches data in our hybrid memory architecture. The cluster management is based on a self-learning scheme on dynamically changeable access patterns by considering any correlation between missed pages. Experimental results show that the overall performance is significantly improved in relation to hit rate, execution time, and energy consumption. Namely, our proposed model can enhance the hit rate by 15% and reduce the execution time by 1.75 times. In addition, we can save energy consumption by around 48% by cutting the number of flushed pages to about an eighth of that in a conventional system.