Browsing by Author "Jearls, James Chandler"

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    Open-Source Parameterized Low-Latency Aggressive Hardware Compressor and Decompressor for Memory Compression
    Jearls, James Chandler (Virginia Tech, 2021-06-16)
    In recent years, memory has shown to be a constraining factor in many workloads. Memory is an expensive necessity in many situations, from embedded devices with a few kilobytes of SRAM to warehouse-scale computers with thousands of terabytes of DRAM. Memory compression has existed in all major operating systems for many years. However, while faster than swapping to a disk, memory decompression adds latency to data read operations. Companies and research groups have investigated hardware compression to mitigate these problems. Still, open-source low-latency hardware compressors and decompressors do not exist; as such, every group that studies hardware compression must re-implement. Importantly, because the devices that can benefit from memory compression vary so widely, there is no single solution to address all devices' area, latency, power, and bandwidth requirements. This work intends to address the many issues with hardware compressors and decompressors. This work implements hardware accelerators for three popular compression algorithms; LZ77, LZW, and Huffman encoding. Each implementation includes a compressor and decompressor, and all designs are entirely parameterized. There are a total of 22 parameters between the designs in this work. All of the designs are open-source under a permissive license. Finally, configurations of the work can achieve decompression latencies under 500 nanoseconds, much closer than existing works to the 255 nanoseconds required to read an uncompressed 4 KB page. The configurations of this work accomplish this while still achieving compression ratios comparable to software compression algorithms.