METICULOUS: An FPGA-based Main Memory Emulator for System Software Studies
Takahiro Hirofuchi, Takaaki Fukai, Akram Ben Ahmed, Ryousei Takano,, Kento Sato

TL;DR
This paper introduces an FPGA-based main memory emulator that enables system software studies on emerging memory technologies by accurately simulating various performance characteristics with minimal overhead.
Contribution
It presents a hardware memory emulator on FPGA that can emulate multiple memory regions with different performance traits for system software research.
Findings
Successfully emulates memory latencies and bandwidths with minimal overhead
Allows changing emulation parameters for different memory regions dynamically
Works transparently with CPU cores and unmodified software
Abstract
Due to the scaling problem of the DRAM technology, non-volatile memory devices, which are based on different principle of operation than DRAM, are now being intensively developed to expand the main memory of computers. Disaggregated memory is also drawing attention as an emerging technology to scale up the main memory. Although system software studies need to discuss management mechanisms for the new main memory designs incorporating such emerging memory systems, there are no feasible memory emulation mechanisms that efficiently work for large-scale, privileged programs such as operating systems and hypervisors. In this paper, we propose an FPGA-based main memory emulator for system software studies on new main memory systems. It can emulate the main memory incorporating multiple memory regions with different performance characteristics. For the address region of each memory device, it…
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Taxonomy
TopicsParallel Computing and Optimization Techniques · Embedded Systems Design Techniques · Radiation Effects in Electronics
