Publications by Babak Falsafi | EPFL Graph Search

Related publications (89)

Exploiting Errors for Efficiency: A Survey from Circuits to Applications

Babak Falsafi, Alexandros Daglis, Dorde Jevdic, Eva Darulova, Mattia Cacciotti

When a computational task tolerates a relaxation of its specification or when an algorithm tolerates the effects of noise in its execution, hardware, system software, and programming language compilers or their runtime systems can trade deviations from cor ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2020

Practical Off-chip Meta-data for Temporal Memory Streaming

Anastasia Ailamaki, Babak Falsafi, Michael Ferdman

Prior research demonstrates that temporal memory streaming and related address-correlating prefetchers improve performance of commercial server workloads though increased memory level parallelism. Unfortunately, these prefetchers require large on-chip meta ...

2009

Meet the Walkers: Accelerating Index Traversals for In-Memory Databases

Babak Falsafi, Boris Robert Grot, Javier Picorel Obando, Yusuf Onur Koçberber

The explosive growth in digital data and its growing role in real-time decision support motivate the design of high-performance database management systems (DBMSs). Meanwhile, slowdown in supply voltage scaling has stymied improvements in core performance ...

2013

Die-Stacked DRAM Caches for Servers: Hit Ratio, Latency, or Bandwidth? Have It All with Footprint Cache

Babak Falsafi, Stavros Volos, Dorde Jevdic

Recent research advocates using large die-stacked DRAM caches to break the memory bandwidth wall. Existing DRAM cache designs fall into one of two categories — block-based and page-based. The former organize data in conventional blocks (e.g., 64B), ensurin ...

ACM2013

PAI: A lightweight mechanism for single-node memory recovery in DSM servers

Babak Falsafi

Several recent studies identify the memory system as the most frequent source of hardware failures in commercial servers. Techniques to protect the memory system from failures must continue to service memory requests, despite hardware failures. Furthermore ...

2007

Cooperative Concurrency Control for Write-Intensive Key-Value Workloads

Babak Falsafi, Alexandros Daglis, Mark Johnathon Sutherland

Key-Value Stores (KVS) are foundational infrastructure components for online services. Due to their latency-critical nature, today’s best-performing KVS contain a plethora of full-stack optimizations commonly targeting read-mostly, popularity-skewed worklo ...

ACM2023

Manycore Network Interfaces for In-Memory Rack-Scale Computing

Babak Falsafi, Edouard Bugnion, Boris Robert Grot, Alexandros Daglis, Stanko Novakovic

Datacenter operators rely on low-cost, high-density technologies to maximize throughput for data-intensive services with tight tail latencies. In-memory rack-scale computing is emerging as a promising paradigm in scale-out datacenters capitalizing on commo ...

2015

Towards Near-Threshold Server Processors

David Atienza Alonso, Luca Benini, Babak Falsafi, Marina Zapater Sancho, Pablo Garcia del Valle, Javier Picorel Obando, Ali Pahlevan, Arash Pourhabibi Zarandi

The popularity of cloud computing has led to a dramatic increase in the number of data centers in the world. The ever-increasing computational demands along with the slowdown in technology scaling has ushered an era of power-limited servers. Techniques suc ...

IEEE/ACM2016

Cuckoo Directory: A Scalable Directory for Many-Core Systems

Babak Falsafi, Pejman Lotfi Kamran, Michael Ferdman

Growing core counts have highlighted the need for scalable on-chip coherence mechanisms. The increase in the number of on-chip cores exposes the energy and area costs of scaling the directories. Duplicate-tag based directories require highly associative st ...

IEEE Press2011

Scale-Out Processors

Babak Falsafi, Boris Robert Grot, Javier Picorel Obando, Yusuf Onur Koçberber, Stavros Volos, Dorde Jevdic, Pejman Lotfi Kamran, Michael Ferdman, Al Mutaz Adileh

Scale-out datacenters mandate high per-server throughput to get the maximum benefit from the large TCO investment. Emerging applications (e.g., data serving and web search) that run in these datacenters operate on vast datasets that are not accommodated by ...

Ieee2012

Flexible hardware acceleration for instruction-grain program monitoring

Babak Falsafi, Evangelos Vlachos

Instruction-grain program monitoring tools, which check and analyze executing programs at the granularity of individual instructions, are invaluable for quickly detecting bugs and security attacks and then limiting their damage (via containment and/or reco ...

2008

Effective Interplay Between Sparsity and Quantization: from Theory to Practice

Elizaveta Kostenok, Danila Mishin, Babak Falsafi, Martin Jaggi, Simla Burcu Harma

The increasing size of deep neural networks (DNNs) necessitates effective model compression to reduce their computational and memory footprints. Sparsity and quantization are two prominent compression methods that have been shown to reduce DNNs' computatio ...

2025

Unison Cache: A Scalable and Effective Die-Stacked DRAM Cache

Babak Falsafi, Dorde Jevdic, Ilknur Cansu Kaynak

Recent research advocates large die-stacked DRAM caches in manycore servers to break the memory latency and bandwidth wall. To realize their full potential, die-stacked DRAM caches necessitate low lookup latencies, high hit rates and the efficient use of o ...

IEEE2014

NOC-Out: Microarchitecting a Scale-Out Processor

Babak Falsafi, Boris Robert Grot, Pejman Lotfi Kamran

Scale-out server workloads benefit from many-core processor organizations that enable high throughput thanks to abundant request-level parallelism. A key characteristic of these workloads is the large instruction footprint that exceeds the capacity of priv ...

2012

LTRF: Enabling High-Capacity Register Files for GPUs via Hardware/Software Cooperative Register Prefetching

Babak Falsafi, Mario Paulo Drumond Lages De Oliveira, Hamid Sarbazi-Azad

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) employ large register files to accommodate all active threads and accelerate context switching. Unfortunately, register files are a scalability bottleneck for future GPUs due to long access latency, high power consumption, ...

2018

Mechanisms for store-wait-free multiprocessors

Anastasia Ailamaki, Babak Falsafi

Store misses cause significant delays in shared-memory multiprocessors because of limited store buffering and ordering constraints required for proper synchronization. Today, programmers must choose from a spectrum of memory consistency models that reduce ...

2007

Rebooting Virtual Memory with Midgard

Babak Falsafi, Mathias Josef Payer, Siddharth Gupta, Atri Bhattacharyya, Yunho Oh, Abhishek Bhattacharjee

Computer systems designers are building cache hierarchies with higher capacity to capture the ever-increasing working sets of modern workloads. Cache hierarchies with higher capacity improve system performance but shift the performance bottleneck to addres ...

2021

SMoTherSpectre: Exploiting Speculative Execution through Port Contention

Babak Falsafi, Mathias Josef Payer, Atri Bhattacharyya

Spectre, Meltdown, and related attacks have demonstrated that kernels, hypervisors, trusted execution environments, and browsers are prone to information disclosure through micro-architectural weaknesses. However, it remains unclear as to what extent other ...

ACM2019

Training DNNs with Hybrid Block Floating Point

Babak Falsafi, Martin Jaggi, Tao Lin, Mario Paulo Drumond Lages De Oliveira

The wide adoption of DNNs has given birth to unrelenting computing requirements, forcing datacenter operators to adopt domain-specific accelerators to train them. These accelerators typically employ densely packed full-precision floating-point arithmetic t ...

NEURAL INFORMATION PROCESSING SYSTEMS (NIPS)2018

TurboTag: Lookup Filtering to Reduce Coherence Directory Power

Babak Falsafi, Michael Ferdman, Pejman Lotfi Kamran

On-chip coherence directories of today’s multi-core systems are not energy efficient. Coherence directories dissipate a significant fraction of their power on unnecessary lookups when running commercial server and scientific workloads. These workloads have ...

ACM2010