Reinforcement Learning-Based Joint Reliability and Performance Optimization for Hybrid-Cache Computing Servers

Computing servers play a key role in the development and process of emerging compute-intensive applications in recent years. However, they need to operate efficiently from an energy perspective viewpoint, while maximizing the performance and lifetime of the hottest server components (i.e., cores and cache). Previous methods focused on either improving energy efficiency by adopting new hybrid-cache architectures including the resistive random-access memory (RRAM) and static random-access memory (SRAM) at the hardware level, or exploring trade-offs between lifetime limitation and performance of multi-core processors under stable workloads conditions. Therefore, no work has so far proposed a co-optimization method with hybrid-cache-based server architectures for real-life dynamic scenarios taking into account scalability, performance, lifetime reliability, and energy efficiency at the same time. In this paper, we first formulate a reliability model for the hybrid-cache architecture to enable precise lifetime reliability management and energy efficiency optimization. We also include the performance and energy overheads of cache switching, and optimize the benefits of hybrid-cache usage for better energy efficiency and performance. Then, we propose a runtime Q-Learning-based reliability management and performance optimization approach for multi-core microprocessors with the hybrid-cache architecture, jointly incorporated with a dynamic preemptive priority queue management method to improve the overall tasks’ performance by targeting to respect their end time limits. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves up to 44% average performance (i.e., tasks execution time) improvement, while maintaining the whole system design lifetime longer than 5 years, when compared to the latest state-of-the-art energy efficiency optimization and reliability management methods for computing servers.