Design Space Exploration of Memory Controller Placement in Throughput Processors with Deep Learning

As throughput-oriented processors incur a significant number of data accesses, the placement of memory controllers (MCs) has a critical impact on overall performance. However, due to the lack of a systematic way to explore the huge design space of MC placements, only a few ad-hoc placements have been proposed, leaving much of the opportunity unexploited. In this paper, we present a novel deep-learning based framework that explores this opportunity intelligently and automatically. The proposed framework employs a genetic algorithm to efficiently guide exploration through the large design space while utilizing deep learning methods to provide fast performance prediction of design points instead of relying on slow full system simulations. Evaluation shows that, the proposed deep learning models achieves a speedup of 282X for the search process, and the MC placement found by our framework improves the average performance (IPC) of 18 benchmarks by 19.3 percent over the best-known placement found by human intuition.