Spectre and Meltdown took much of our community by surprise. I personally found these attacks fascinating because they didn't rely on a bug in any particular hardware implementation, but leveraged undefined behavior. Specifically, Spectre and Meltdown can exfiltrate potentially secret memory data by detecting the effects of speculative instructions that …
read moreInferring Kaveri's Shared Virtual Memory Implementation
Note: Most of this work was completed in 2014. These results may not hold with current drivers and more recent hardware (e.g., Carrizo)
Kaveri is AMD's first APU (accelerated processing unit, e.g. a chip with both a CPU and GPU on-die) to provide an implementation of heterogeneous system …
read moreSetting up gem5 full system
This is partially a followup to Creating disk images for gem5 and partially how to setup x86 full system for gem5. In this post, I'll discuss how to create a disk image from scratch and start using it with gem5.
It is important for computer architecture research to use the …
read moreWhen to use 3D die-stacking for bandwidth-constrained big data workloads
3D die-stacking is an exciting emerging technology. It promises extremely high bandwidth interconnects for relatively power (at least when compared to current memory technology). Some of my previous work has looked at how this increased bandwidth can significantly improve performance. This is especially true for bandwidth-constrained workloads, like database scan …
read moreCreating disk images for gem5
gem5 Horrors and what we can do about it
This post is a post which mostly follows the talk that I am giving at the gem5 Users Workshop. This post contains some more details on problems that I skipped in my talk and some references that I was not able to include in a presentation. You can view my …
read moreSetting up a gem5 container
Linux containers (LXC) are a relatively new feature in Linux. From what I gather, they allow you to create a sandboxed environment to run applications. Containers are somewhere between processes and a full virtual machine. They allow you to use and link to any libraries or applications you need, but …
read moreFirst post!