Category: Processing performance

Facebook’s (Meta) Kangaroo, a better cache for billions of small objects

Posted on by Ray in Data efficiency, Processing performance

Read an article this week in Blocks and Files, Facebook’s Kangaroo jumps over flash limitations which spiked my interest and I went and searched for more info on this and found a fb blog post, Kangaroo: A new flash cache optimized for tiny objects which sent me to an ACM SOSP (Syposium on O/S Principles) best paper of 2021, Caching billions of tiny objects on flash.

First, as you may recall flash has inherent limitations when it comes to writing. The more writes to a flash device the more NAND cells start to fail over time. Flash devices are only rated for some amount (of standard, ~4KB) block writes, For example, the Micron 5300 Max SSD only supports 3-5 (4KB blocks) DWPD (drive writes per day). So, a 2TB Micron Max 5300 SSD can only sustain from ~1.5 to 2.4B 4KB block writes per day. Now that seems more than sufficient for most work but when somebody like fb, using the SSD as a object cache, writes a few billion or more 100B(yte) objects and does this day in or day out, can consume an SSD in no time. Especially if they are writing one 100 B object per block

So there’s got to be a better way to cache small objects into bigger blocks. Their paper talks of two prior approaches:

  • Log structured storage – here multiple 100B objects are stored in a single a 4KB block and iwritten out with one IO rather than 40. This works fairly well but the index ,which maps an object key, to a log location, takes up a lot of memory space. If your caching ~3B 100B objects in a logs and each object index takes 16 bytes that’s a data space of 48GB.
  • Associative set storage – here each object is hashed into a set of (one or more) storage blocks and is stored there. In this case there’s no DRAM index but you do need a quick way to determine if an object is in the set storage or not. This can be done with bloom filters (see: wikipedia article on bloom filters). So if each associative set stores 400 objects and one needs to store 3B objects one needs a 30 MB of bloom filters (assuming 4bytes each). The only problem with associative sets is that when one adds an element to a set. the set has to be rewritten. So if over time you add 400 objects to a set you are writing that set 400 times. All of which eats into the DWPD budget for the flash storage.

In Kangaroo, fb engineers have combined the best of both of these together and added a small DRAM cache.

How does it work?

Their 1st tier is a DRAM cache, which is ~1% of the capacity of the whole object cache. Objects are inserted into the DRAM cache first and are evicted in a least recently used fashion, that is object’s that have not been used in the longest time are moved out of this cache and are written to the next layer (not quite but get to that in a moment).

Their 2nd tier is a log structured system, at ~5% of cache capacity. They call this a KLog and it consists of a ring of 4KB blocks on SSD, with a DRAM index telling where each object is located on the ring.. Objects come in and are buffered together into a 4KB block and are written to the next empty slot in the ring with its DRAM index updated accordingly. Objects are evicted from Klog in such a way that a group of them, that would be located in the same associative set and are LRU, can all be evicted at the same time. They have structured the Klog DRAM index so that it makes finding all these objects easy. Also any log structured system needs to deal with garbage collection, Let’s say you evict 5 objects in a 4K block, that leaves 35 that are still good. Garbage collection will read a number of these partially full blocks and mash all the good objects together leaving free space for new objects that need to be cached.

The 3rd and final tier is a set associative store, they call the Kset that uses bloom filters to show object presence. For this tier, an object’s key is hashed to find a block to put it in, the block is read and the object inserted and the block rewritten. Objects are evicted out of the set associative store based on LRU within a block. The bloom filters are used to determine if the object exists in an set associative block.

There are a few items missing from the above description. As can be seen in Figure 3B above, Kangaroo can jettison objects that are LRUed out of DRAM instead of adding them to the Klog. The paper suggests this can be done purely at random, say only admit, into the Klog, 95% of the objects at random being LRUed from DRAM. The jettison threshold for Klog to Kset is different. Here they will jettison single object sets. That is if there were only one object that would be evicted and written to a set, it’s jettisoned rather than saved in the Kset. The engineers call this a Kset threshold of 2 (indicating minimum number of objects in a single set that can be moved to Kset)..

While understanding an objects LRU is fairly easy if you have a DRAM index element for each block, it’s much harder when there’s no individual object index available, as in Kset.

To deal with tracking LRU in the Kset, fb engineers created a RRIParoo index with a DRAM index portion and a flash resident index portion.

  • RRIParoo’s DRAM index is effectively a 40 byte bit map which contains one bit per object, corresponding to its location in the block. A bit on in this DRAM bitmap indicates that the corresponding object has been referenced since the last time the flash resident index has been re-written. .
  • RRIParoo’s flash resident index contains 3 bit integers, each one corresponding to an object in the block. This integer represents how many clock ticks, it has been since the corresponding object has been referenced. When the need arises to add an object to a full block, the object clock counters in that block’s RRIP flash index are all incremented until one has gotten to the oldest time frame b’111′ or 7. It is this object that is evicted.

New objects are given an arbitrary clock tick count say b’001′ or 1 (as shown in Fig. 6, in the paper they use b’110′ or 6), which is not too high to be evicted right away but not too low to be considered highly referenced.

How well does Kangaroo perform

According to the paper using the same flash storage and DRAM, it can reduce cache miss ratio by 29% over set associative or log structured cache’s alone. They tested this by using simulations of real world activity on their fb social network trees.

The engineers did some sensitivity testing using various Kangaroo algorithm parameters to see how sensitive read miss rates were to Klog admission percentage, RRIParoo flash index element (clock tick counter) size, Klog capacity and Kset admission threshold.

Kangaroo performance read miss rate sensitivity to various algorithm parameters

Applications of the technology

Obviously this is great for Twitter and facebook/meta as both of these deal with vast volumes of small data objects. But databases, Kafka data streams, IoT data, etc all deal with small blocks of data and can benefit from better caching that Kangaroo offers.

Storage could also use something similar only in this case, a) the objects aren’t small and b) the cache is all in memory. DRAM indexes for storage caching, especially when we have TBs of DRAM cache, can be still be significant, especially if an index element is kept for each block in cache. So the technique could also be deployed for large storage caches as well.

Then again, similar techniques could be used to provide caching for multiple tiers of storage. Say DRAM cache, SSD Log cache and SSD associative set cache for data blocks with the blocks actually stored on large disks or QLC/PLC SSDs.

Photo credit(s):

New era of graphical AI is near #AIFD2 @Intel

Posted on by Ray in Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive computing, Deep Learning, Information economy, Machine Learning, Optical networking, Processing performance, Strategic Inflection Points, Strategic planning, Visionary leadershp

I attended AIFD2 ( videos of their sessions available here) a couple of weeks back and for the last session, Intel presented information on what they had been working on for new graphical optimized cores and a partner they have, called Katana Graph, which supports a highly optimized graphical analytics processing tool set using latest generation Xeon compute and Optane PMEM.

What’s so special about graphs

The challenges with graphical processing is that it’s nothing like standard 2D tables/images or 3D oriented data sets. It’s essentially a non-Euclidean data space that has nodes with edges that connect them.

But graphs are everywhere we look today, for instance, “friend” connection graphs, “terrorist” networks, page rank algorithms, drug impacts on biochemical pathways, cut points (single points of failure in networks or electrical grids), and of course optimized routing.

The challenge is that large graphs aren’t easily processed with standard scale up or scale out architectures. Part of this is that graphs are very sparse, one node could point to one other node or to millions. Due to this sparsity, standard data caching fetch logic (such as fetching everything adjacent to a memory request) and standardized vector processing (same instructions applied to data in sequence) don’t work very well at all. Also standard compute branch prediction logic doesn’t work. (Not sure why but apparently branching for graph processing depends more on data at the node or in the edge connecting nodes).

Intel talked about a new compute core they’ve been working on, which was was in response to a DARPA funded activity to speed up graphical processing and activities 1000X over current CPU/GPU hardware capabilities.

Intel presented on their PIUMA core technology was also described in a 2020 research paper (Programmable Integrated and Unified Memory Architecture) and YouTube video (Programmable Unified Memory Architecture).

Intel’s PIUMA Technology

DARPA’s goals became public in 2017 and described their Hierarchical Identity Verify Exploit (HIVE) architecture. HIVE is DOD’s description of a graphical analytics processor and is a multi-institutional initiative to speed up graphical processing. .

Intel PIUMA cores come with a multitude of 64-bit RISC processor pipelines with a global (shared) address space, memory and network interfaces that are optimized for 8 byte data transfers, a (globally addressed) scratchpad memory and an offload engine for common operations like scatter/gather memory access.

Each multi-thread PIUMA core has a set of instruction caches, small data caches and register files to support each thread (pipeline) in execution. And a PIUMA core has a number of multi-thread cores that are connected together.

PIUMA cores are optimized for TTEPS (Tera-Traversed Edges Per Second) and attempt to balance IO, memory and compute for graphical activities. PIUMA multi-thread cores are tied together into (completely connected) clique into a tile, multiple tiles are connected within a single node and multiple nodes are tied together with a 8 byte transfer optimized network into a PIUMA system.

P[I]UMA (labeled PUMA in the video) multi-thread cores apparently eschew extensive data and instruction caching to focus on creating a large number of relatively simple cores, that can process a multitude of threads at the same time. Most of these threads will be waiting on memory, so the more threads executing, the less likely that whole pipeline will need to be idle, and hopefully the more processing speedup can result.

Performance of P[I]UMA architecture vs. a standard Xeon compute architecture on graphical analytics and other graph oriented tasks were simulated with some results presented below.

Simulated speedup for a single node with P[I]UMAtechnology vs. Xeon range anywhere from 3.1x to 279x and depends on the amount of computation required at each node (or edge). (Intel saw no speedups between a single Xeon node and multiple Xeon Nodes, so the speedup results for 16 P[I]UMA nodes was 16X a single P[I]UMA node).

Having a global address space across all PIUMA nodes in a system is pretty impressive. We guess this is intrinsic to their (large) graph processing performance and is dependent on their use of photonics HyperX networking between nodes for low latency, small (8 byte) data access.

Katana Graph software

Another part of Intel’s session at AIFD2 was on their partnership with Katana Graph, a scale out graph analytics software provider. Katana Graph can take advantage of ubiquitous Xeon compute and Optane PMEM to speed up and scale-out graph processing. Katana Graph uses Intel’s oneAPI.

Katana graph is architected to support some of the largest graphs around. They tested it with the WDC12 web data commons 2012 page crawl with 3.5B nodes (pages) and 128B connections (links) between nodes.

Katana runs on AWS, Azure, GCP hyperscaler environment as well as on prem and can scale up to 256 systems.

Katana Graph performance results for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) is shown below. GNNs are similar to AI/ML/DL CNNs but use graphical data rather than images. One can take a graph and reduce (convolute) and summarize segments to classify them. Moreover, GNNs can be used to understand whether two nodes are connected and whether two (sub)graphs are equivalent/similar.

In addition to GNNs, Katana Graph supports Graph Transformer Networks (GTNs) which can analyze meta paths within a larger, heterogeneous graph. The challenge with large graphs (say friend/terrorist networks) is that there are a large number of distinct sub-graphs within the graph. GTNs can break heterogenous graphs into sub- or meta-graphs, which can then be used to understand these relationships at smaller scales.

At AIFD2, Intel also presented an update on their Analytics Zoo, which is Intel’s MLops framework. But that will need to wait for another time.

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It was sort of a revelation to me that graphical data was not amenable to normal compute core processing using today’s GPUs or CPUs. DARPA (and Intel) saw this defect as a need for a completely different, brand new compute architecture.

Even so, Intel’s partnership with Katana Graph says that even today compute environment could provide higher performance on graphical data with suitable optimizations.

It would be interesting to see what Katana Graph could do using PIUMA technology and appropriate optimizations.

In any case, we shouldn’t need to wait long, Intel indicated in the video that P[I]UMA Technology chips could be here within the next year or so.

Comments?

Photo Credit(s):

  • From Intel’s AIFD2 presentations
  • From Intel’s PUMA you tube video

The birth of biocomputing (on paper)

Posted on by Ray in Distributed computing, Mobile computing, Processing performance, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness

Read an article this past week discussing how researchers in Barcelona Spain have constructed a biological computing device on paper (see Biocomputer built with cells printed on paper). Their research was written up in a Nature Article (see 2D printed multi-cellular devices performing digital or analog computations).

We’ve written about DNA computing and storage before (see DNA IT …, DNA Computing… posts and our GBoS podcast on DNA storage…). But this technology takes all that to another level.

2-bit_ALU (from wikimedia.org)
2-bit_ALU (from wikimedia.org)

The challenges with biological computing previously had been how to perform the input processing and output within a single cell or when using multiple cells for computations, how to wire the cells together to provide the combinational logic required for the circuit.

The researchers in Spain seemed to have solved the wiring problems by using diffusion across a porous surface (like paper) to create a carrier signal (wire equivalent) and having cell groups at different locations along this diffusion path either enhance or block that diffusion, amplify/reduce that diffusion or transform that diffusion into something different

Analog (combinatorial circuitry types of) computation for this biocomputer are performed based on the location of sets of cells along this carrier signal. So spatial positioning is central to the device and the computation it performs. Not unlike digital or combinatorial circuitry, different computations can be performed just by altering the position along the wire (carrier signal) that gates (cells) are placed.

Their process seems to start with designing multiple cell groups to provide the processing desired, i.e., enhancing, blocking, transforming of the diffusion along the carrier signal, etc. Once they have the cells required to transform the diffusion process along the carrier signal, they then determine the spatial layout for the cells to be used in the logical circuit to perform the computation desired. Then they create a stamp which has wells (or indentations) which can be filled in with the cells required for the computation. Then they fill these wells with cells and nutrients for their operation and then stamp the circuit onto a porous surface.

The carrier signal the research team uses is a small molecule, the bacterial 3OC6HSL acyl homoserine lactone (AHL) which seems to be naturally used in a sort of biologic quorum sensing. And the computational cells produce an enzyme that enhances or degrades the AHL flow along the carrier signal. The AHL diffuses across the paper and encounters these computational cells along the way and compute whatever it is that’s required to be computed. At some point a cell transforms AHL levels to something externally available

They created:

  • Source cells (Sn) that take a substance as input (say mercury) and converts this into AHL
  • .Gate cells (M) that provide a switch on the solution of AHL difusing across the substrate.
  • Carrier reporter cells (CR) which can be used to report on concentrations of AHL.

The CR cells produce green florescent reporter proteins (GFP). Moreover, each gate cell expresses red florescent reporter proteins (RFP) as well for sort of a diagnostic tap into its individual activity.

Mapping of a general transistor architecture on a cellular printed pattern obtained using a stamping template. Similar to the transistor architecture, the cellular pattern is composed of three main components: source (S1 cells), gate (M− cells) that responds to external inputs and a drain (CR cells) as the final output responding to the presence of the carrying signal (CS). b Stamping template used to create the circuit made of PLA with a layer of synthetic fibre (green). Cellular inks (yellow) are in their corresponding containers. Before stamping, the synthetic fibre is soaked with the different cell types. Finally, the stamping template is pressed against the paper surface, depositing all cells. c Circuit response. In the absence of external input, i.e. arabinose, the CS encoded in the production of AHL molecules by S1 cells diffuses along the surface, inducing GFP expression in reporter cells CR. In the presence of 10−3 M arabinose (Ara), the modulatory element M−ara produces the AHL cleaving enzyme Aiia, which degrades the CS. Error bars are the standard deviation (SD) of three independent experiments. Data are presented as mean values ± SD. Experiments are performed on paper strips. The average fold change is 5.6x. d Photography of the device. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.

Using S, M and CR cells they are able to create any type of gate needed. This includes OR, AND, NOR and XNOR gates and just about any truth table needed. With this level of logic they could potentially implement any analog circuit on a piece of paper (if it was big enough).

a Schematic representation of the multi-branch implementation of a truth table. bImplementation of different logic gates. A schematic representation of the cells used in each paper strip and their corresponding distance points is given (Left). Gates with two sources of S1 (OR and XNOR gates) are circuits carrying two branches, while the other gates (NOR and AND gates) can be implemented with just one branch. Input concentrations are Ara = 10−3 M and aTc = 10−6 M. M+aTc and M−aTc are, respectively, positive and negative modulatory cells responding to aTc. M+ara and M−ara are, respectively, positive and negative modulatory cells responding to arabinose. S1 cells produce AHL constitutively and CR are the reporter cells. Error bars are the standard deviation (SD) of three independent experiments. The average fold change has been obtained from the mean of ON and OFF states from each circuit. OR gate 14.31x, AND gate 6.21x, NOR gate 6.58x, XNOR gate 5.6x. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.

As we learn in circuits class, any digital logic can be reduced to one of a few gates, such as NAND or NOR.

As an example of uses of the biocomputing, they implemented a mercury level sensing device. Once the device is dipped in a solution with mercury, the device will display a number of green florescent dots indicating the mercury levels of the solution

The bio-logical computer can be stamped onto any surface that supports agent diffusion, even flexible surfaces such as paper. The process can create a single use bio-logic computer, sort of smart litmus paper that could be used once and then recycled.

The computational cells stay “alive” during operation by metabolizing nutrients they were stamped with. As the biocomputer uses biological cells and paper (or any flexible diffusible substrate) as variable inputs and cells can be reproduced ad-infinitum for almost no cost, biocomputers like this can be made very inexpensively and once designed (and the input cells and stamp created) they can be manufactured like a printing press churns out magazines.

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Now I’d like to see some sort of biological clock capability that could be used to transform this combinatorial logic into digital logic. And then combine all this with DNA based storage and I think we have all the parts needed for a biological, ARM/RISC V/POWER/X86 based server.

And a capacitor would be a nice addition, then maybe they could design a DRAM device.

Its one off nature, or single use will be a problem. But maybe we can figure out a way to feed all the S, M, and CR cells that make up all the gates (and storage) for the device. Sort of supplying biological power (food) to the device so that it could perform computations continuously.

Ok, maybe it will be glacially slow (as diffusion takes time). We could potentially speed it up by optimizing the diffusion/enzymatic processes. But it will never be the speed of modern computers.

However, it can be made very cheap, and very height dense. Just imagine a stack of these devices 40in tall that would potentially consist of 4000-8000 or more processing elements with immense amounts of storage. And slowness may not be as much of a problem.

Now if we could just figure out how to plug it into an ethernet network, then we’d have something.

Photo credit(s):

  • 2 Bit alu from Wikipedia
  • Figures 1 & 3 from Nature article 2D printed multi-cellular devices performing digital and analog computation

New DRAM can be layered on top of CPU cores

Posted on by Ray in Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Market dynamics, Processing performance, Storage class memories, Strategic Inflection Points

At the last IEDM (IEEE International ElectronDevices Meenting), there were two sessions devoted to a new type of DRAM cell that consists or 2 transistors and no capacitors (2TOC) that can be built in layers on top of a micro processor which doesn’t disturb the microprocessor silicon. I couldn’t access (behind paywalls) the actual research but one of the research groups was from Belgium (IMEC) and the other from the US (Notre Dame and R.I.T). This was written up in a couple of teaser articles in the tech press (see IEEE Spectrum tech talk article).

DRAM today is built using 1 transistor and 1 capacitor (1T1C). And it appears that capacitors and logic used for microprocessors aren’t very compatible. As such, most DRAM lives outside the CPU (or microprocessor cores) chip and is attached over a memory bus.

New 2T0C DRAM Bit Cell: Data is written by appliying current to the WBL and WWL and bit’s are read by seeing if acurrent can pass through the RWL RBL

Memory busses have gotten faster in order to allow faster access to DRAM but this to is starting to reach fundamental physical limits and DRAM memory sizes aren’t scaling like the used to.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a new type of DRAM that could be easlly built closer or even layered on top of a CPU chip, with faster direct access from/to CPU cores. through inter chip electronics.

Oxide based 2T0C DRAM

DRAM was designed from the start with 1T1C so that it could hold a charge. With a charge in place it could be read out quickly and refreshed periodically without much of a problem.

The researcher found that at certain sizes (and with proper dopants) small transistors can also hold a (small) charge without needing any capacitor.

By optimizing the chemistry used to produce those transistors they were able to make 2T0C transistors hold memory values. And given the fabrication ease of these new transistors, they can easily be built on top of CPU cores, at a low enough temperature so as not to disturb the CPU core logic.

But, given these characteristics the new 2T0C DRAMB can also be built up in layers. Just like 3D NAND and unlike current DRAM technologies.

Today 3D NAND is being built at over 64 layers, with Flash NAND roadmap’s showing double or quadruple that number of layers on the horizon. Researchers presenting at IMEC were able to fabricate an 8 layer 2T0C DRAM on top of a microprocessor and provide direct, lightening fast access to it.

The other thing about the new DRAM technology is that it doesn’t need to be refreshed as often. Current DRAM must be refreshed every 64 msec. This new 2T0C technology has a much longer retention time and currently only needs to be refreshed every 400s and much longer retention times are technically feasible.

Some examples of processing needing more memory:

  • AI/ML and the memory wall -Deep learning models are getting so big that memory size is starting to become a limiting factor in AI model effectiveness. And this is just with DRAM today. Optane and other SCM can start to address some of this problem but ithe problem doesn’t go away, AI DL models are just getting more complex I recently read an article where Google trained a trillion parameter language model.
  • In memory databases – SAP HANA is just one example but they are other startups as well as traditional database providers that are starting to use huge amounts of memory to process data at lightening fast speeds. Data only seems to grow not shrink.

Yes Optane and other SCM today can solve some of thise problems. But having a 3D scaleable DRAM memory, that can be built right on chip core, with longer hold times and faster direct access can be a game changer.

It’s unclear whether we will see all DRAM move to the new 2T0C format, but if it can scale well in the Z direction has better access times, and longer retention, it’s unclear why this wouldn’t displace all current 1T1C DRAM over time. However, given the $Bs of R&D spend on new and current DRAM 1T1C fabrication technology, it’s going to be a tough and long battle.

Now if the new 2T0C DRAM could only move from 1 bit per cell to multiple bits per cell, like SLC to MLC NAND, the battle would heat up considerably.

Photo Credits:

Is hardware innovation accelerating – hardware vs. software innovation (round 6)

Posted on by Ray in Artificial Intelligence, Brain emulation, Cognitive computing, Data compression, Data QoS, Data transmission, Deep Learning, Ethernet, Infiniband, Market dynamics, Neuromorphic, NVMe, Processing performance, Strategic Inflection Points

There’s something happening to the IT industry, that maybe has not happened in a couple of decades or so but hardware innovation is back. We’ve been covering bits and pieces of it in our hardware vs software innovation series (see Open source ASiCs – HW vs. SW innovation [round 5] post).

But first please take our new poll:

Hardware innovation never really went away, Intel, AMD, Apple and others had always worked on new compute chips. DRAM and NAND also have taken giant leaps over the last two decades. These were all major hardware suppliers. But special purpose chips, non CPU compute engines, and hardware accelerators had been relegated to the dustbins of history as the CPU giants kept assimilating their functionality into the next round of CPU chips.

And then something happened. It kind of made sense for GPUs to be their own electronics as these were SIMD architectures intrinsically different than SISD, standard von Neumann X86 and ARM CPUs architectures

But for some reason it didn’t stop there. We first started seeing some inklings of new hardware innovation in the AI space with a number of special purpose DL NN accelerators coming online over the last 5 years or so (see Google TPU, SC20-Cerebras, GraphCore GC2 IPU chip, AI at the Edge Mythic and Syntiants IPU chips, and neuromorphic chips from BrainChip, Intel, IBM , others). Again, one could look at these as taking the SIMD model of GPUs into a slightly different direction. It’s probably one reason that GPUs were so useful for AI-ML-DL but further accelerations were now possible.

But it hasn’t stopped there either. In the last year or so we have seen SPUs (Nebulon Storage), DPUs (Fungible, NVIDIA Networking, others), and computational storage (NGD Systems, ScaleFlux Storage, others) all come online and become available to the enterprise. And most of these are for more normal workload environments, i.e., not AI-ML-DL workloads,

I thought at first these were just FPGAs implementing different logic but now I understand that many of these include ASICs as well. Most of these incorporate a standard von Neumann CPU (mostly ARM) along with special purpose hardware to speed up certain types of processing (such as low latency data transfer, encryption, compression, etc.).

What happened?

It’s pretty easy to understand why non-von Neumann computing architectures should come about. Witness all those new AI-ML-DL chips that have become available. And why these would be implemented outside the normal X86-ARM CPU environment.

But SPU, DPUs and computational storage, all have typical von Neumann CPUs (mostly ARM) as well as other special purpose logic on them.

Why?

I believe there are a few reasons, but the main two are that Moore’s law (every 2 years halving the size of transistors, effectively doubling transistor counts in same area) is slowing down and Dennard scaling (as you reduce the size of transistors their power consumption goes down and speed goes up) has stopped almost. Both of these have caused major CPU chip manufacturers to focus on adding cores to boost performance rather than just adding more transistors to the same core to increase functionality.

This hasn’t stopped adding instruction functionality to each CPU, but it has slowed considerably. And single (core) processor speeds (GHz) have reached a plateau.

But what it has stopped is having the real estate available on a CPU chip to absorb lots of additional hardware functionality. Which had been the case since the 1980’s.

I was talking with a friend who used to work on math co-processors, like the 8087, 80287, & 80387 that performed floating point arithmetic. But after the 486, floating point logic was completely integrated into the CPU chip itself, killing off the co-processors business.

Hardware design is getting easier & chip fabrication is becoming a commodity

We wrote a post a couple of weeks back talking about an open foundry (see HW vs. SW innovation round 5 noted above)that would take a hardware design and manufacture the ASICs for you for free (or at little cost). This says that the tool chain to perform chip design is becoming more standardized and much less complex. Does this mean that it takes less than 18 months to create an ASIC. I don’t know but it seems so.

But the real interesting aspect of this is that world class foundries are now available outside the major CPU developers. And these foundries, for a fair but high price, would be glad to fabricate a 1000 or million chips for you.

Yes your basic state of the art fab probably costs $12B plus these days. But all that has meant is that A) they will take any chip design and manufacture it, B) they need to keep the factory volume up by manufacturing chips in order to amortize the FAB’s high price and C) they have to keep their technology competitive or chip manufacturing will go elsewhere.

So chip fabrication is not quite a commodity. But there’s enough state of the art FABs in existence to make it seem so.

But it’s also physics

The extremely low latencies that are available with NVMe storage and, higher speed networking (100GbE & above) are demanding a lot more processing power to keep up with. And just the physics of how long it takes to transfer data across a distance (aka racks) is starting to consume too much overhead and impacting other work that could be done.

When we start measuring IO latencies in under 50 microseconds, there’s just not a lot of CPU instructions and task switching that can go on anymore. Yes, you could devote a whole core or two to this process and keep up with it. But wouldn’t the data center be better served keeping that core busy with normal work and offloading that low-latency, realtime (like) work to a hardware accelerator that could be executing on the network rather than behind a NIC.

So real time processing has become faster, or rather the amount of time to execute CPU instructions to switch tasks and to process data that needs to be done in realtime to keep up with faster line speed is becoming shorter.

So that explains DPUs, smart NICS, DPUs, & SPUs. What about the other hardware accelerator cards.

  • AI-ML-DL is becoming such an important and data AND compute intensive workload that just like GPUs before them, TPUs & IPUs are becoming a necessary evil if we want to service those workloads effectively and expeditiously.
  • Computational storage is becoming more wide spread because although data compression can be easily done at the CPU, it can be done faster (less data needs to be transferred back and forth) at the smart Drive.

My guess we haven’t seen the end of this at all. When you open up the possibility of having a long term business model, focused on hardware accelerators there would seem to be a lot of stuff that needs to be done and could be done faster and more effectively outside the core CPU.

There was a point over the last decade where software was destined to “eat the world”. I get a lot of flack for saying that was BS and that hardware innovation is really eating the world. Now that hardtware innovation’s back, it seems to be a little of both.

Comments?

Photo Credits:

New PCM could supply 36PB of memory to CPUs

Posted on by Ray in Energy efficiency, Processing performance, R&D measures, Storage class memories, Storage density, Storage energy use, Storage performance

Read an article this past week on how quantum geometry can enable a new form of PCM (phase change memory) that is based on stacks of metallic layers (SciTech Daily article: Berry curvature memory: quantum geometry enables information storage in metallic layers), That article referred to a Nature article (Berry curvature memory through electrically driven stacking transitions) behind a paywall but I found a pre-print of it, Berry curvature memory through electrically driven stacking transitions.

Figure 1| Signatures of two different electrically-driven phase transitions in WTe2. a, Side view (b–c plane) of unit cell showing possible stacking orders in WTe2 (monoclinic 1T’, polar orthorhombic Td,↑ or Td,↓) and schematics of their Berry curvature distributions in momentum space. The spontaneous polarization and the Berry curvature dipole are labelled as P and D, respectively. The yellow spheres refer to W atoms while the black spheres represent Te atoms. b, Schematic of dual-gate h-BN capped WTe2 evice. c, Electrical conductance G with rectangular-shape hysteresis (labeled as Type I) induced by external doping at 80 K. Pure doping was applied following Vt/dt = Vb/db under a scan sequence indicated by black arrows. d, Electrical conductance G with butterfly-shape switching (labeled as Type II) driven by electric field at 80 K. Pure E field was applied following -Vt/dt = Vb/db under a scan sequence indicated by black arrows. Positive E⊥ is defined along +c axis. Based on the distinct hysteresis observations in c and d, two different phase transitions can be induced by different gating configurations.

The number one challenge in IT today,is that data just keeps growing. 2+ Exabytes today and much more tomorrow.

All that information takes storage, bandwidth and ultimately some form of computation to take advantage of it. While computation, bandwidth, and storage density all keep going up, at some point the energy required to read, write, transmit and compute over all these Exabytes of data will become a significant burden to the world.

PCM and other forms of NVM such as Intel’s Optane PMEM, have brought a step change in how much data can be stored close to server CPUs today. And as, Optane PMEM doesn’t require refresh, it has also reduced the energy required to store and sustain that data over DRAM. I have no doubt that density, energy consumption and performance will continue to improve for these devices over the coming years, if not decades.

In the mean time, researchers are actively pursuing different classes of material that could replace or improve on PCM with even less power, better performance and higher densities. Berry Curvature Memory is the first I’ve seen that has several significant advantages over PCM today.

Berry Curvature Memory (BCM)

I spent some time trying to gain an understanding of Berry Curvatures.. As much as I can gather it’s a quantum-mechanical geometric effect that quantifies the topological characteristics of the entanglement of electrons in a crystal. Suffice it to say, it’s something that can be measured as a elecro-magnetic field that provides phase transitions (on-off) in a metallic crystal at the topological level. 

In the case of BCM, they used three to five atomically thin, mono-layers of  WTe2 (Tungsten Ditelluride), a Type II  Weyl semi-metal that exhibits super conductivity, high magneto-resistance, and the ability to alter interlayer sliding through the use of terahertz (Thz) radiation. 

It appears that by using BCM in a memory, 

Fig. 4| Layer-parity selective Berry curvature memory behavior in Td,↑ to Td,↓ stacking transition. a,
The nonlinear Hall effect measurement schematics. An applied current flow along the a axis results in the generation of nonlinear Hall voltage along the b axis, proportional to the Berry curvature dipole strength at the Fermi level. b, Quadratic amplitude of nonlinear transverse voltage at 2ω as a function of longitudinal current at ω. c, d, Electric field dependent longitudinal conductance (upper figure) and nonlinear Hall signal (lower figure) in trilayer WTe2 and four-layer WTe2 respectively. Though similar butterfly-shape hysteresis in longitudinal conductance are observed, the sign of the nonlinear Hall signal was observed to be reversed in the trilayer while maintaining unchanged in the four-layer crystal. Because the nonlinear Hall signal (V⊥,2ω / (V//,ω)2 ) is proportional to Berry curvature dipole strength, it indicates the flipping of Berry curvature dipole only occurs in trilayer. e, Schematics of layer-parity selective symmetry operations effectively transforming Td,↑ to Td,↓. The interlayer sliding transition between these two ferroelectric stackings is equivalent to an inversion operation in odd layer while a mirror operation respect to the ab plane in even layer. f, g, Calculated Berry curvature Ωc distribution in 2D Brillouin zone at the Fermi level for Td,↑ and Td,↓ in trilayer and four-layer WTe2. The symmetry operation analysis and first principle calculations confirm Berry curvature and its dipole sign reversal in trilayer while invariant in four-layer, leading to the observed layer-parity selective nonlinear Hall memory behavior.
  • To alter a memory cell takes “a few meV/unit cell, two orders of magnitude less than conventional bond rearrangement in phase change materials” (PCM). Which in laymen’s terms says it takes 100X less energy to change a bit than PCM.
  • To alter a memory cell it uses terahertz radiation (Thz) this uses pulses of light or other electromagnetic radiation whose wavelength is on the order of picoseconds or less to change a memory cell. This is 1000X faster than other PCM that exist today.
  • To construct a BCM memory cell takes between 13 and 16  atoms of W and Te2 constructed of 3 to 5 layers of atomically thin, WTe2 semi-metal.

While it’s hard to see in the figure above, the way this memory works is that the inner layer slides left to right with respect to the picture and it’s this realignment of atoms between the three or five layers that give rise to the changes in the Berry Curvature phase space or provide on-off switching.

To get from the lab to product is a long road but the fact that it has density, energy and speed advantages measured in multiple orders of magnitude certainly bode well for it’s potential to disrupt current PCM technologies.

Potential problems with BCM

Nonetheless, even though it exhibits superior performance characteritics with respect to PCM, there are a number of possible issues that could limit it’s use.

One concern (on my part) is that the inner-layer sliding may induce some sort of fatigue. Although, I’ve heard that mechanical fatigue at the atomic level is not nearly as much of a concern as one sees in (> atomic scale and) larger structures. I must assume this would induce some stress and as such, limit the (Write cycles) endurance of BCM.

Another possible concern is how to shrink size of the Thz radiation required to only write a small area of the material. Yes one memory cell can be measured bi the width of 3 atoms, but the next question is how far away do I need to place the next memory cell. The laser used in BCM focused down to ~1.5 μm. At this size it’s 1,000X bigger than the BCM memory cell width (~1.5 nm).

Yet another potential problem is that current BCM must be embedded in a continuous flow of liquid nitrogen (@80K). Unclear how much of a requirement this temperature is for BCM to function. But there are no computers nowadays that require this level of cooling.

Figure 3| Td,↑ to Td,↓ stacking transitions with preserved crystal orientation in Type II hysteresis. a,
in-situ SHG intensity evolution in Type II phase transition, driven by a pure E field sweep on a four-layer and a five-layer Td-WTe2 devices (indicated by the arrows). Both show butterfly-shape SHG intensity hysteresis responses as a signature of ferroelectric switching between upward and downward polarization phases. The intensity minima at turning points in four-layer and five-layer crystals show significant difference in magnitude, consistent with the layer dependent SHG contrast in 1T’ stacking. This suggests changes in stacking structures take place during the Type II phase transition, which may involve 1T’ stacking as the intermediate state. b, Raman spectra of both interlayer and intralayer vibrations of fully poled upward and downward polarization phases in the 5L sample, showing nearly identical characteristic phonons of polar Td crystals. c, SHG intensity of fully poled upward and downward polarization phases as a function of analyzer polarization angle, with fixed incident polarization along p direction (or b axis). Both the polarization patterns and lobe orientations of these two phases are almost the same and can be well fitted based on the second order susceptibility matrix of Pm space group (Supplementary Information Section I). These observations reveal the transition between Td,↑ and Td,↓ stacking orders is the origin of
Type II phase transition, through which the crystal orientations are preserved.

Finally, from my perspective, can such a memory can be stacked vertically, with a higher number of layers. Yes there are three to five layers of the WTe2 used in BCM but can you put another three to five layers on top of that, and then another. Although the researchers used three, four and five layer configurations, it appears that although it changed the amplitude of the Berry Curvature effect, it didn’t seem to add more states to the transition.. If we were to more layers of WTe2 would we be able to discern say 16 different states (like QLC NAND today).

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So there’s a ways to go to productize BCM. But, aside from eliminating the low-temperature requirements, everything else looks pretty doable, at least to me.

I think it would open up a whole new dimension of applications, if we had say 60TB of memory to compute with, don’t you think?

Comments?

[Updated the title from 60TB to PB to 36PB as I understood how much memory PMEM can provide today…, the Eds.]

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AI ML DL hardware performance results from MLPerf

Posted on by Ray in Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive computing, Deep Learning, Distributed computing, Machine Learning, Processing performance, Strategic Inflection Points

Read an article a couple of weeks back from IEEE Spectrum, New Records for AI Training which discussed recent MLPerf v0.7 performance results. The article mentioned that MLPerf performance on its benchmarks has increased by ~2.7X in the last year alone.

The MLPerf organization was started back in 2018 to supply machine learning workload performance results, somewhat like what SPEC and TPC did for NFS and transaction processing. The MLPerf organization documented their philosophy in a paper.

But first please take our new poll:

As far as I can tell, MLPerf is the only benchmark currently available to show hardware system performance on AI training and inferencing. Below we report on MLPerf training results.

MLPerf also reports on both closed and open division benchmark results. Closed division submission all use the same software algorithms for each workload submission. This way one can compare workload performance across different hardware systems. Open division results can make use of any algorithm to achieve the desired results on the problem set. We report on MLPerf closed division results below.

Current MLPerf v0.7 (open and closed division) training results are available online (on GitHub) and are summarized in a training results page on their web site.

MLPerf v0.7 workload changes

The MLPerf team added a few new workloads and upped the game of another benchmark for V0.7

  • Recommendation DLRM: a replacement for what was used in MLPerf v0.6 and is from Facebook providing more parallelism in training for recommendations.
  • Wikipedia BERT: an addition to what was used in MLPerf v0.6 and is a new natural language processing (N?P) frontend, trained on Wikipedia which is used with other language processing capabilities.
  • Go MiniGo: an enhancement to MLPerf v0.6 MiniGo accuracy requirements and uses reinforcement learning to learn to play Go well enough to achieve a 50% win rate. For v0.7, they now use a full sized, 19X19 Go board and upped the win rate requirement to 50%.

MiniGo Results

A couple of items of note for the MiniGo results. There are essentially 3 different architectures represented in the above: NVIDIA DGX series (DGX A100, DGX-2H, DGX-1), Google TPUs (V4 and V3) and Intel (8 server nodes with Copper Lake-6 CPUs).

Google TPUs are considered internal and are only available to Google, its hardware partners or on GCP. Although MLPerf include GCP TPU system results for other workloads, there were none submitted for MiniGo.

The Intel system is a preview of their latest gen Copper Lake chips, which may not be commercially available yet. On the other hand, all NVIDIA systems are commercially available and can be deployed in your data center today.

As one can see in the above, NVIDIA systems swept the first 3 positions on our Top 10 MiniGo chart. A DGX A100 came in at #1, reaching a 50% win rate at MiniGo in mere 17 seconds using 448 CPUs and 1792 A100 GPUs. Coming in at #2 at 30 seconds was another DGX A100 using 64 CPUs and 256 A100 GPUs. And at #3 at 35 seconds was a DGX-2H using 64 CPUs and 512 V100 GPUs.

Next at #4 at 151 seconds was a Google TPU system with 64 TPUv4 accelerators (unclear how many CPUs, if any are used, results show 0). Note, an 8-node Intel server with the 32 CPUs (4/node) using the latest gen Copper Lake (-6) CPU came in at #7 using 409 seconds to achieve the training results.

There are 6 other MLPerf workloads including DLRM and BERT mentioned above. Each of these deserve their own discussion on top ten results. Alas, they will need to wait for another time and I will cover all of them in future posts.

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Nowadays, with much of IT turning to AI ML DL to provide critical services, it’s more important than ever to understand what can and can’t be done with available hardware. The fact that one can train a model to play decent Go in 17 seconds on a large DGX A100 cluster and under 7 minutes on an 8-node, leading edge, Intel server cluster is pretty impressive.

Despite MLPerf’s best efforts, it’s still tough to compare ML performance across systems when there’s so much diversity in the underlying hardware, especially in GPU, TPU and CPU counts. IMHO, it would be very useful to have a single GPU , TPU or CPU system submission requirement for each workload. That way one could compare how well each hardware element can perform the workload in isolation.

Nonetheless, the MLPerf suite of benchmarks provides a great first step in understanding what today’s hardware can accomplish in ML training (and inferencing).

Comments?

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Hybrid digital training-analog inferencing AI

Posted on by Ray in Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive computing, Deep Learning, Energy efficiency, IoT, Neural network, PCM neuromorphic computing, Processing performance

Read an article from IBM Research, Iso-accuracy DL inferencing with in-memory computing, the other day that referred to an article in Nature, Accurate DNN inferencing using computational PCM (phase change memory or memresistive technology) which discussed using a hybrid digital-analog computational approach to DNN (deep neural network) training-inferencing AI systems. It’s important to note that the PCM device is both a storage device and a computational device, thus performing two functions in one circuit.

In the past, we have seenPCM circuitry used in neuromorphic AI. The use of PCM here is not that (see our Are neuromorphic chips a dead end? post).

Hybrid digital-analog AI has the potential to be more energy efficient and use a smaller footprint than digital AI alone. Presumably, the new approach is focused on edge devices for IoT and other energy or space limited AI deployments.

Whats different in Hybrid digital-analog AI

As researchers began examining the use of analog circuitry for use in AI deployments, the nature of analog technology led to inaccuracy and under performance in DNN inferencing. This was because of the “non-idealities” of analog circuitry. In other words, analog electronics has some intrinsic capabilities that induce some difficulties when modeling digital logic and digital exactitude is difficult to implement precisely in analog circuitry.

The caption for Figure 1 in the article runs to great length but to summarize (a) is the DNN model for an image classification DNN with fewer inputs and outputs so that it can ultimately fit on a PCM array of 512×512; (b) shows how noise is injected during the forward propagation phase of the DNN training and how the DNN weights are flattened into a 2D matrix and are programmed into the PCM device using differential conductance with additional normalization circuitry

As a result, the researchers had to come up with some slight modifications to the typical DNN training and inferencing process to improve analog PCM inferencing. Those changes involve:

  • Injecting noise during DNN neural network training, so that the resultant DNN model becomes more noise resistant;
  • Flattening the resultant DNN model from 3D to 2D so that neural network node weights can be implementing as differential conductance in the analog PCM circuitry.
  • Normalizing the internal DNN layer outputs before input to the next layer in the model

Analog devices are intrinsically more noisy than digital devices, so DNN noise sensitivity had to be reduced. During normal DNN training there is both forward pass of inputs to generate outputs and a backward propagation pass (to adjust node weights) to fit the model to the required outputs. The researchers found that by injecting noise during the forward pass they were able to create a more noise resistant DNN.

Differential conductance uses the difference between the conductance of two circuits. So a single node weight is mapped to two different circuit conductance values in the PCM device. By using differential conductance, the PCM devices inherent noisiness can be reduced from the DNN node propagation.

In addition, each layer’s outputs are normalized via additional circuitry before being used as input for the next layer in the model. This has the affect of counteracting PCM circuitry drift over time (see below).

Hybrid AI results

The researchers modeled their new approach and also performed some physical testing of a digital-analog DNN. Using CIFAR-10 image data and the ResNet-32 DNN model. The process began with an already trained DNN which was then retrained while injecting noise during forward pass processing. The resultant DNN was then modeled and programed into a PCM circuit for implementation testing.

Part D of Figure 4 shows the Baseline which represents a completely digital implementation using FP32 multiplication logic; Experiment which represents the actual use of the PCM device with a global drift calibration performed on each layer before inferencing; Mode which represents theira digital model of the PCM device and its expected accuracy. Blue band is one standard-deviation on the modeled result.

One challenge with any memristive device is that over time its functionality can drift. The researchers implemented a global drift calibration or normalization circuitry to counteract this. One can see evidence of drift in experimental results between ~20sec and ~60 seconds into testing. During this interval PCM inferencing accuracy dropped from 93.8% to 93.2% but then stayed there for the remainder of the experiment (~28 hrs). The baseline noted in the chart used digital FP32 arithmetic for infererenci and achieved ~93.9% for the duration of the test.

Certainly not as accurate as the baseline all digital implementation, but implementing DNN inferencing model in PCM and only losing 0.7% accuracy seems more than offset by the clear gain in energy and footprint reduction.

While the simplistic global drift calibration (GDC) worked fairly well during testing, the researchers developed another adaptive (batch normalization statistical [AdaBS]) approach, using a calibration image set (from the training data) and at idle times, feed these through the PCM device to calculate an average error used to adjust the PCM circuitry. As modeled and tested, the AdaBS approach increased accuracy and retained (at least modeling showed) accuracy over longer time frames.

The researchers were also able to show that implementing part (first and last layers) of the DNN model in digital FP32 and the rest in PCM improved inferencing accuracy even more.

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As shown above, a hybrid digital-analog PCM AI deployment can provide similar accuracy (at least for CIFAR-10/ResNet-24 image recognition) to an all digital DNN model but due to the efficiencies of the PCM analog circuitry allowed for a more energy efficient DNN deployment.

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