Scaling Datacenter Accelerators with Computation Reuse Architectures
Authors: Adi Fuchs, David Wentzalff. Princeton University Venue: ISCA 2018 Being the third paper at ISCA-18 that exploits input redundancy in one way or other (after EVA2 and Euphrates), COREx (COmputation-REuse Accelerators) proposes an effective idea to improve speedup and energy efficiency of datacenters. The paper is motivated by the manifestation of Zipf's law in data center workloads such as internet traffic and data compression. As the paper title suggests, COREx stores the outputs and inputs of common kernels, and skips computation by sending the stored output to the host, if the current input is the same as stored input. They define the storing step as " memorization " Trading communication for computation, this work is the exact opposite of AMNESIAC (published at ASPLOS-17), which trades computation for communication. They define 3 constraints that needs to be satisfied in-order for memorization to be successful. (1) Correct results: Memorization must pr...