Self-Optimizing Memory Controllers: Proposing Request-level Scheduling
A. M. Shawky, Mohamed Watheq El-Kharashi, Mona Safar, Mohamed Amin Dessouky · 2022 Second International Conference on Computer Science, Engineering and Applications (ICCSEA) · 2022
Self-Optimizing Memory Controllers present a great potential in the future of memory controllers. As they alleviate the burden of designing an optimal memory scheduling policy, while providing adaptability to different workloads and systems. Previous state-of-art controllers scheduled memory accesses on the command level. This causes the agent to lose sight of the relation between commands and can lead to the issuing of unuseful sequences of precharge/activate of rows or closing banks that should have been left open, and vice versa. In this work we propose a bank-aware self-optimizing memory controller that schedules memory references on the request-level, presenting to the agent the actual problem it needs to tackle. This simplifies the evaluation of system attributes and eliminates the need for correction mechanisms that was needed in previous controllers. With the proposed algorithm a maximum of 18% increase in the data bus utilization is achieved compared to the commonly used FR-FCFS algorithm.