A Modern Large-Scale Memory Characterization Laboratory

Real memory chip characterization yields insights into fundamental operational characteristics of modern memory, enabling new mechanisms that improve memory performance, robustness, security, and energy efficiency. We describe our large-scale DRAM characterization laboratory for understanding DRAM. A key building block of this laboratory is DRAM Bender, a versatile and easy-to-use modern DRAM characterization infrastructure. We have updated DRAM Bender to i) introduce support for new types of characterization experiments, ii) expand on its DRAM interface standard support, and iii) make it easier to use at large scale. This paper introduces these updates for the first time. We hope our infrastructure enables the community to discover new problems and solve critical memory scaling issues, enabling the overcoming of the huge memory bottleneck that plagues modern computing systems.