Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “memory array”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 37 records · Page 2

Persistent Memory Object Storage and Indexing for Scientific Computing

This paper presents Mosiqs, a persistent memory object storage framework with metadata indexing and querying for scientific computing. We design Mosiqs based on the key idea that memory objects on shared PM pool can live beyond the application lifetime and can become the sharing currency for applications and scientists. Mosiqs provides an aggregate memory pool atop an array of persistent memory devices to store and access memory objects. Mosiqs uses a lightweight persistent memory key-value store to manage the metadata of memory objects such as persistent pointer mappings, which enables memory object sharing for effective scientific collaborations. Mosiqs is implemented atop PMDK. We evaluate the proposed approach on many-core server with an array of real PM devices. The preliminary evaluation confirms a 100% improvement for write and 30% in read performance against a PM-aware file system approach.

Khan, Awais↗

MOSIQS: Persistent Memory Object Storage With Metadata Indexing and Querying for Scientific Computing

Scientific applications often require high-bandwidth shared storage to perform joint simulations and collaborative data analytics. Shared memory pools provide a chance to satisfy such needs. Recently, a high-speed network such as Gen-Z utilizing persistent memory (PM) offers an opportunity to create a shared memory pool connected to compute nodes. However, there are several challenges to use scientific applications on the shared memory pool directly such as scalability, failure-atomicity, and lack of scientific metadata-based search and query. In this paper, we propose MOSIQS, a persistent memory object storage framework with metadata indexing and querying for scientific computing. We design MOSIQS based on the key idea that memory objects on PM pool can live beyond the application lifetime and can become the sharing currency for applications and scientists. MOSIQS provides an aggregate memory pool atop an array of persistent memory devices to store and access memory objects to accelerate scientific computing. MOSIQS uses a lightweight persistent memory key-value store to manage the metadata of memory objects, which enables memory object sharing. To facilitate metadata search and query over millions of memory objects resident on memory pool, we introduce Group Split and Merge (GSM), a novel persistent index data structure designed primarily for scientific datasets. GSM splits and merges dynamically to minimize the query search space and maintains low query processing time while overcoming the index storage overhead. MOSIQS is implemented on top of PMDK. We evaluate the proposed approach on many-core server with an array of real PM devices. Experimental results show that MOSIQS gains a 100% write performance improvement and executes multi-attribute queries efficiently with 2.7× less index storage overhead offering significant potential to speed up scientific computing applications.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

High-T c Superconducting Memory Cell

In this paper, operational principles of a cryogenic memory cell that utilizes high-temperature superconductors (high-T c ) are presented. Such a cell consists of three inductively coupled Josephson junctions coupled via inductors. Design and operational logic of this type of cell were recently introduced and demonstrated for low temperature 4 K environment. The basic memory cell operations (read, write, reset) can be implemented on the same simple circuit and both destructive and non-destructive memory cell operations can be realized. Here, we present the design principles and computational validation of basic memory cell operations (write, read, and reset) for the high-T c memory cell. In conclusion, our results for the high-T c memory cell operations show very good resemblance with the previously presented low-temperature 4 K memory cell operations.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗

A Novel Scalable Array Design for III-V Compound Semiconductor-based Nonvolatile Memory (UltraRAM) with Separate Read-Write Paths

The dream of achieving a universal memory that can provide robust non-volatile memory states along with low-energy operation has been the key driving force of memory research. Despite dominating the memory market, conventional charge-based memories cannot satisfy these requirements. However, UltraRAM, an oxide-free charge-based memory cell, aims to achieve both of these requirements. This device achieves non-volatility (with an endurance of over 10 7 cycles and a retention of over 1000 years) along with switching at low-voltage (±2.3 V) utilizing a triple-barrier resonant tunneling (TBRT) structure made of InAs/AlSb. In this work, we propose an array design for UltraRAM-based memory devices. Our proposed memory array features separate read-write path and eliminates the possibility of accidentally switching the memory states stored in the array. Moreover, our design allows us to read all the cells in a column in one cycle without imposing any limit on the scalability. Besides, since the read operation in our proposed design is independent of the write mechanism, there is flexibility to optimize the read operation for memory and in-memory computing applications.

Alam, Shamiul↗

Utah FORGE: Well 56-32 Drilling Data and Logs

This dataset consists of drilling data (Pason data spreadsheets, daily reports, days v. depth, mud logs), Schlumberger logs (FMI, shear anisotropy analysis, memory, sonic, array induction/spectral density/dual spaced neutron/gamma ray/caliper, spectral GR/temperature, and Gardner density correlation), and an end of well report (EOWR) for Utah FORGE well 56-32. This is a vertical well that will be used for seismic monitoring. It was drilled between February 7th and February 21st 2021 to a depth of 9,145 feet. More information about this well can be found at: https://utahforge.com/2021/02/09/drilling-progress-of-well-56-32/ (linked below)

15 GEOTHERMAL ENERGY↗

qSIEVE: Efficient qLDPC Memory via Systolic Movement in Atom Arrays

As quantum machines have scaled up in their number of qubits, significant research has turned towards increasing their fidelity with quantum error correction codes. Although promising results have been shown with the surface code, which only requires near-neighbor connections between qubits, the high qubit overhead of such local codes promises to be problematic. Consequently, recent work has explored non-local quantum LDPC (qLDPC) codes, which have good asymptotic encoding rates. Despite theoretical progress, hardware implementations of these codes have been a longstanding challenge. At the experimental level, demonstrations of movement based communication on atom arrays suggest this is a powerful new primitive to achieve non-local connectivity. Leveraging this, we present a protocol for implementing non-local qLDPC codes in hardware. Our protocol, qSIEVE, is a co-design of such codes with movement in atom arrays. qSIEVE defines a restricted family of qLDPC codes that can be implemented efficiently with systolic movement. We then quantify the utility of qSIEVE in the context of a complete fault tolerant architecture. We compare the cost of implementing benchmark programs in a standard, surface code only architecture and a mixed architecture where data is stored in qLDPC memory with qSIEVE and loaded to surface codes for computation.

Quantum error correction↗

Distributed-Memory Sparse Deep Neural Network Inference Using Global Arrays

Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) models exhibit tremendous promise in developing efficient and productive distributed-memory parallel applications. They have been used extensively in scientific computations due to conveniently offering a ``shared-memory''-like model and convenient interfaces that separate communication with synchronization. Traditionally, PGAS communication models have been applied to dense/contiguously distributed data, but most modern applications depict varied levels of sparsity. Existing PGAS models require certain adaptations to support distributed sparse computations, since associated computations often require matrix arithmetic, in addition to data movement. The Global Arrays toolkit from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is one of the earliest PGAS models to combine one-sided data communication and distributed matrix operations and is still used in the popular NWChem quantum chemistry suite. Recently, we have expanded the Global Arrays toolkit to support common sparse operations, like sparse matrix-dense matrix multiplies (SpMM), sparse matrix-sparse matrix multiplication (SpGEMM) and Sampled Dense-Dense Matrix Multiplication (SDDMM). As it turns out, these operations are the bedrock of sparse Deep Learning (DL); sparse deep neural networks and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have gained increasing attention recently in achieving speedups on training and inference with reduced memory footprints. Unlike scientific applications in High Performance Computing (HPC), modern (distributed-memory capable) DL toolkits often rely on non-standardized and closed-source vendor software optimizations, creating challenges in software-hardware co-design at scale. Our goal is to support a variety of distributed-memory sparse matrix operations and helper functions in the newly created Sparse Global Arrays (SGA), such that it is possible to build portable and productive Machine Learning scenarios for algorithm/software and hardware codesign purposes. Contemporary data-parallel schemes for training/inference are undergoing a major overhaul since model replication limits scalability and causes resource inefficiencies. As such, we have adopted tensor parallelism in decomposing the model and inputs, to mitigate memory issues. Current implementation is built on top of MPI and uses CPUs to maximize the portability across the platforms.

Distributed computing, machine learning↗

DIF3D-VARIANT 12.0: Updates and New Features

The DIF3D code has been a workhorse of fast reactor analysis work at Argonne National Laboratory for over 40 years. In 1995, a transport option called VARIANT was added to DIF3D to improve the flux solutions for fast reactor problems which we term DIF3D-VARIANT today. DIF3D-VARIANT performs nodal neutron transport calculations using P N or SP N theory in Cartesian and hexagonal two- and three-dimensional geometries. The limited computing capabilities of the time restricted DIF3D-VARIANT to use at most a 6 th order spatial approximation combined with a P3 flux approximation and P1 scattering kernel for a 33 group structure on most studied reactor problems. Computer capabilities have increased steadily since 1995 and today much larger space-angle-energy approximations are possible. This manuscript serves as an update to the theory section of the original DIF3D-VARIANT manual and details more than twenty years of changes made to DIF3D to make version 12 which was released on November 1 st , 2024. The primary focus of the initial work was to extend the space-angle approximations available in DIF3D-VARIANT such that the error due to transport approximations could be better understood. This work was started and completed in 2002 and marked the official version 10. Unfortunately, those higher order approximations could not be used at that time due to the memory constraints of the BPOINTER part of DIF3D (limited to 2 GB). In version 11, completed in 2012, BPOINTER was circumvented in DIF3D-VARIANT for the largest arrays by introducing a Fortran 90 module called LMA (Large Memory Array). This seamlessly replaces all of the functionality of the BPOINTER concept, but it allows 64 bit addressing for every array such that they can be larger than 2 GB. It is now common for DIF3D-VARIANT jobs to consume 50 GB of memory on modern workstations when using high order space-angle approximations and a large number of groups. Many improvements were made to version 11 from 2012 to 2022 when work to create version 12 started. For version 12, several parts of DIF3D were updated to improve performance and thread parallelism was introduced to further reduce the runtime. Numerous minor bugs were discovered in DIF3D-VARIANT as part of the process of creating the perturbation and sensitivity code PERSENT. All of these algorithmic problems were identified in the transition from version 10 to version 11 which prevented DIF3D-VARIANT from running efficiently and reliably. Firstly, the coarse mesh rebalance scheme would routinely diverge and a study detailed in this report demonstrates how it was also typically not effective. This is not a failure of the coarse mesh rebalance methodology, but a failure of its implementation in DIF3D-VARIANT for hexagonal geometries. The fission source extrapolation algorithm was also found to be unreliable on larger group structure problems, leading to divergence in some cases and a negligible improvement in performance overall. Finally, the “Omega” acceleration applied to the partial current solver routine of DIF3D-VARIANT was found to cause DIF3D-VARIANT to converge to the wrong answer. To resolve these issues, both the coarse mesh rebalance and fission source extrapolation were permanently disabled in version 11. The Tchebychev acceleration was put in as a temporary reliable alternative but it is generally inferior to coarse mesh rebalance or coarse mesh finite difference. For the Omega acceleration, the factor was restricted to guarantee that it would not cause follow-on errors in PERSENT. Due to limited funding to support maintenance and development of DIF3D in the last 10 years, no effort was spent since to resolve the outer iteration acceleration. Except for the threading work, all of the changes discussed in this manuscript refer to changes made between version 10 and version 11. Performance comparisons are done to demonstrate the improvements from version 9 to version 12. As will be demonstrated, the updated versi

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

Energy-efficient Mott activation neuron for full-hardware implementation of neural networks

To circumvent the von Neumann bottleneck, substantial progress has been made towards in-memory computing with synaptic devices. However, compact nanodevices implementing non-linear activation functions are required for efficient full-hardware implementation of deep neural networks. Here, in this work, we present an energy-efficient and compact Mott activation neuron based on vanadium dioxide and its successful integration with a conductive bridge random access memory (CBRAM) crossbar array in hardware. The Mott activation neuron implements the rectified linear unit function in the analogue domain. The neuron devices consume substantially less energy and occupy two orders of magnitude smaller area than those of analogue complementary metal–oxide semiconductor implementations. The LeNet-5 network with Mott activation neurons achieves 98.38% accuracy on the MNIST dataset, close to the ideal software accuracy. We perform large-scale image edge detection using the Mott activation neurons integrated with a CBRAM crossbar array. Our findings provide a solution towards large-scale, highly parallel and energy-efficient in-memory computing systems for neural networks.

electrical and electronic engineering↗

ZFP Hardware Implementation

As core counts increase in new HPC systems with comparatively little increase in memory bandwidth, the trend is an effective decrease in memory bandwidth per core. Other bandwidth limitations in HPC systems exist between CPU and GPU memory, between system nodes, and between node memory and storage. Compression of floating-point data has the potential to reduce data movement and pressure across these communication channels. Furthermore, it has the potential to reduce the footprint of floating-point arrays stored in memory. ZFP, implemented in software, is gaining traction as an effective method in floating-point compression; however, performance gains are limited to the spare compute cycles available before reaching the bandwidth limitations of the communication channel. A hardware implementation of ZFP has the potential to raise the bar on performance. From the inception of ZFP, it was designed to accommodate a hardware implementation.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Differential Power Processing for Ultra-Efficient Data Storage

Here this paper presents the hardware, software, and power codesign of an ultra-efficient data storage server with differential power processing (DPP). DPP can reduce the power conversion stress, improve the efficiency, and enhance the functionality of modular power electronics systems. The power inputs of a large number of hard disk drives (HDDs) were connected in series and supported by a multiport ac-coupled differential power processing (MAC-DPP) converter through a multiwinding transformer. Methods for controlling the multi-input multi-output power flow in the multiwinding transformer while avoiding core saturation were investigated. A ten-port MAC-DPP prototype with 700-W/in 3 power density was built to support a 450-W HDD storage system with ten series-stacked voltage domains. The prototype was tested on a 50-HDD server testbench, and the overall system loss is below 1 W (99.77% system efficiency). The server was able to maintain high-speed reading and writing operation of all 50 HDDs against the worst hot-swapping scenarios. A variety of hardware/software configurations and many cloud storage techniques were tested on the fully functioning server. Experimental results show that the energy efficiency of large-scale information systems (CPU/GPU clusters, memory banks, HDD arrays, etc.) can be greatly improved by software, hardware, and power codesign.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Vector-Matrix Multiplication Engine for Neuromorphic Computation with a CBRAM Crossbar Array [Slides]

The core function of many neural network algorithms is the dot product, or vector matrix multiply (VMM) operation. Crossbar arrays utilizing resistive memory elements can reduce computational energy in neural algorithms by up to five orders of magnitude compared to conventional CPUs. Moving data between a processor, SRAM, and DRAM dominates energy consumption. By utilizing analog operations to reduce data movement, resistive memory crossbars can enable processing of large amounts of data at lower energy than conventional memory architectures.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

ZFP: A compressed array representation for numerical computations

HPC trends favor algorithms and implementations that reduce data motion relative to FLOPS. We investigate the use of lossy compressed data arrays in place of traditional IEEE floating point arrays to store the primary data of calculations. Simulation is fundamentally an exercise in controlled approximation, and error introduced by finite-precision arithmetic (or lossy compression) is just one of several sources of error that need to be managed to ensure sufficient accuracy in a computed result. We describe ZFP, a compressed numerical format designed for in-memory storage of multidimensional arrays, and summarize theoretical results that demonstrate that the error of repeated lossy compression can be bounded and controlled. Furthermore, we establish a relationship between grid resolution and compression-induced errors and show that, contrary to conventional floating point, ZFP reduces finite-difference errors with finer grids. We present example calculations that demonstrate data reduction by 4x or more with negligible impact on solution accuracy. Our results further demonstrate several orders-of-magnitude increase in accuracy using ZFP over IEEE floating point and Posits for the same storage budget.

Lindstrom, Peter↗

High-Speed Ionic Synaptic Memory Based on 2D Titanium Carbide MXene

Synaptic devices with linear high-speed switching can accelerate learning in artificial neural networks (ANNs) embodied in hardware. Conventional resistive memories however suffer from high write noise and asymmetric conductance tuning, preventing parallel programming of ANN arrays. Electrochemical random-access memories (ECRAMs), where resistive switching occurs by ion insertion into a redox-active channel, aim to address these challenges due to their linear switching and low noise. ECRAMs using 2D materials and metal oxides however suffer from slow ion kinetics, whereas organic ECRAMs enable high-speed operation but face challenges toward on-chip integration due to poor temperature stability of polymers. Here, ECRAMs using 2D titanium carbide (Ti 3 C 2 T x ) MXene that combine the high speed of organics and the integration compatibility of inorganic materials in a single high-performance device are demonstrated. These ECRAMs combine the speed, linearity, write noise, switching energy, and endurance metrics essential for parallel acceleration of ANNs, and importantly, they are stable after heat treatment needed for back-end-of-line integration with Si electronics. The high speed and performance of these ECRAMs introduces MXenes, a large family of 2D carbides and nitrides with more than 30 stoichiometric compositions synthesized to date, as promising candidates for devices operating at the nexus of electrochemistry and electronics.

2D materials↗

Cycle accurate and cycle reproducible memory for an FPGA based hardware accelerator

A method, system and computer program product are disclosed for using a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) to simulate operations of a device under test (DUT). The DUT includes a device memory having a number of input ports, and the FPGA is associated with a target memory having a second number of input ports, the second number being less than the first number. In one embodiment, a given set of inputs is applied to the device memory at a frequency Fd and in a defined cycle of time, and the given set of inputs is applied to the target memory at a frequency Ft. Ft is greater than Fd and cycle accuracy is maintained between the device memory and the target memory. In an embodiment, a cycle accurate model of the DUT memory is created by separating the DUT memory interface protocol from the target memory storage array.

Asaad, Sameh W.↗

Compute in‐Memory with Non‐Volatile Elements for Neural Networks: A Review from a Co‐Design Perspective

Abstract Deep learning has become ubiquitous, touching daily lives across the globe. Today, traditional computer architectures are stressed to their limits in efficiently executing the growing complexity of data and models. Compute‐in‐memory (CIM) can potentially play an important role in developing efficient hardware solutions that reduce data movement from compute‐unit to memory, known as the von Neumann bottleneck. At its heart is a cross‐bar architecture with nodal non‐volatile‐memory elements that performs an analog multiply‐and‐accumulate operation, enabling the matrix‐vector‐multiplications repeatedly used in all neural network workloads. The memory materials can significantly influence final system‐level characteristics and chip performance, including speed, power, and classification accuracy. With an over‐arching co‐design viewpoint, this review assesses the use of cross‐bar based CIM for neural networks, connecting the material properties and the associated design constraints and demands to application, architecture, and performance. Both digital and analog memory are considered, assessing the status for training and inference, and providing metrics for the collective set of properties non‐volatile memory materials will need to demonstrate for a successful CIM technology.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗