DAMOV: A New Methodology and Benchmark Suite for Evaluating Data Movement Bottlenecks

Understand

Data movement between the CPU and main memory is a first-order obstacle against improving performance, scalability, and energy efficiency in modern systems.

• Computer systems employ a range of techniques to reduce overheads tied to data movement, spanning from traditional mechanisms (e.g., deep multi-level cache hierarchies, aggressive hardware prefetchers) to emerging techniques such as Near-Data Processing (NDP), where some computation is moved close to memory.
• Our goal is to methodically identify potential sources of data movement over a broad set of applications and to comprehensively compare traditional compute-centric data movement mitigation techniques to more memory-centric techniques, thereby developing a rigorous understanding of the best techniques to mitigate each source of data movement.
• With this goal in mind, we perform the first large-scale characterization of a wide variety of applications, across a wide range of application domains, to identify fundamental program properties that lead to data movement to/from main memory.