Sagar Karandikar
Sagar is a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google and an (incoming) Assistant Professor in EECS at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on hardware/software co-design for hyperscale cloud systems, spanning various areas including hardware accelerator and server system-on-chip design for hyperscale systems, system optimization and profiling, and agile, open-source hardware development methodologies. More info: https://sagark.org.
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CDPU: Co-designing Compression and Decompression Processing Units for Hyperscale Systems
Ani Udipi
JunSun Choi
Joonho Whangbo
Jerry Zhao
Edwin Lim
Vrishab Madduri
Yakun Sophia Shao
Borivoje Nikolic
Krste Asanovic
Proceedings of the 50th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA (2023)
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General-purpose lossless data compression and decompression ("(de)compression") are used widely in hyperscale systems and are key "datacenter taxes". However, designing optimal hardware compression and decompression processing units ("CDPUs") is challenging due to the variety of algorithms deployed, input data characteristics, and evolving costs of CPU cycles, network bandwidth, and memory/storage capacities.
To navigate this vast design space, we present the first large-scale data-driven analysis of (de)compression usage at a major cloud provider by profiling Google's datacenter fleet. We find that (de)compression consumes 2.9% of fleet CPU cycles and 10-50% of cycles in key services. Demand is also artificially limited; 95% of bytes compressed in the fleet use less capable algorithms to reduce compute, motivating a CDPU that changes cost vs. size tradeoffs.
Prior work has improved the microarchitectural state-of-the-art for CDPUs supporting various algorithms in fixed contexts. However, we find that higher-level design parameters like CDPU placement, hash table sizing, history window sizes, and more have as significant of an impact on the viability of CDPU integration, but are not well-studied. Thus, we present the first end-to-end design/evaluation framework for CDPUs, including: 1. An open-source RTL-based CDPU generator that supports many run-time and compile-time parameters. 2. Integration into an open-source RISC-V SoC for rapid performance and silicon area evaluation across CDPU placements and parameters. 3. An open-source (de)compression benchmark, HyperCompressBench, that is representative of (de)compression usage in Google's fleet.
Using our framework, we perform an extensive design space exploration running HyperCompressBench. Our exploration spans a 46× range in CDPU speedup, 3× range in silicon area (for a single pipeline), and evaluates a variety of CDPU integration techniques to optimize CDPU designs for hyperscale contexts. Our final hyperscale-optimized CDPU instances are up to 10× to 16× faster than a single Xeon core, while consuming a small fraction (as little as 2.4% to 4.7%) of the area.
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Profiling Hyperscale Big Data Processing
Aasheesh Kolli
Abraham Gonzalez
Samira Khan
Sihang Liu
Krste Asanovic
ISCA (2023)
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Computing demand continues to grow exponentially, largely driven by "big data" processing on hyperscale data stores. At the same time, the slowdown in Moore's law is leading the industry to embrace custom computing in large-scale systems. Taken together, these trends motivate the need to characterize live production traffic on these large data processing platforms and understand the opportunity of acceleration at scale.
This paper addresses this key need. We characterize three important production distributed database and data analytics platforms at Google to identify key hardware acceleration opportunities and perform a comprehensive limits study to understand the trade-offs among various hardware acceleration strategies.
We observe that hyperscale data processing platforms spend significant time on distributed storage and other remote work across distributed workers. Therefore, optimizing storage and remote work in addition to compute acceleration is critical for these platforms. We present a detailed breakdown of the compute-intensive functions in these platforms and identify dominant key data operations related to datacenter and systems taxes. We observe that no single accelerator can provide a significant benefit but collectively, a sea of accelerators, can accelerate many of these smaller platform-specific functions. We demonstrate the potential gains of the sea of accelerators proposal in a limits study and analytical model. We perform a comprehensive study to understand the trade-offs between accelerator location (on-chip/off-chip) and invocation model (synchronous/asynchronous). We propose and evaluate a chained accelerator execution model where identified compute-intensive functions are accelerated and pipelined to avoid invocation from the core, achieving a 3x improvement over the baseline system while nearly matching identical performance to an ideal fully asynchronous execution model.
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A Hardware Accelerator for Protocol Buffers
Chris Leary
Jerry Zhao
Dinesh Parimi
Borivoje Nikolic
Krste Asanovic
Proceedings of the 54th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO-54), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA (2021), 462–478
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Serialization frameworks are a fundamental component of scale-out systems, but introduce significant compute overheads. However, they are amenable to acceleration with specialized hardware. To understand the trade-offs involved in architecting such an accelerator, we present the first in-depth study of serialization framework usage at scale by profiling Protocol Buffers (“protobuf”) usage across Google’s datacenter fleet. We use this data to build HyperProtoBench, an open-source benchmark representative of key serialization-framework user services at scale. In doing so, we identify key insights that challenge prevailing assumptions about serialization framework usage.
We use these insights to develop a novel hardware accelerator for protobufs, implemented in RTL and integrated into a RISC-V SoC. Applications can easily harness the accelerator, as it integrates with a modified version of the open-source protobuf library and is wire-compatible with standard protobufs. We have fully open-sourced our RTL, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the only such implementation currently available to the community.
We also present a first-of-its-kind, end-to-end evaluation of our entire RTL-based system running hyperscale-derived benchmarks and microbenchmarks. We boot Linux on the system using FireSim to run these benchmarks and implement the design in a commercial 22nm FinFET process to obtain area and frequency metrics. We demonstrate an average 6.2x to 11.2x performance improvement vs. our baseline RISC-V SoC with BOOM OoO cores and despite the RISC-V SoC’s weaker uncore/supporting components, an average 3.8x improvement vs. a Xeon-based server.
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