IUCRC Preliminary Proposal Planning Grant UC Merced: Center for Memory System Research (CEMSYS)

The memory system has been evolving at a fast pace, driven by applications and advance of hardware technology. The trend of memory-consuming applications and new hardware technology is calling for the birth of new memory systems with larger capacity, higher performance, and even with computing capabilities. Aligned with the trend, memory systems research must be carried out to integrate the new memory systems into the existing software and hardware ecosystems. Such research is critical to the industry, because the industry is looking for solutions to develop new business and deploy their applications with increasingly larger datasets and faster data-generation rate. CEMSYS aims to address the unmet industry research needs on (a) integrating and evaluating emerging memory systems and (b) evolving its applications to make the best usage of emerging memory systems. CEMSYS will work on the following areas: (1) heterogeneous memory; (2) disaggregated memory; (3) big memory systems; (4) processing in memory; (5) memory reliability and security; (6) memory profiling and optimization; (7) emerging cache coherent interconnect (such as CXL); and (8) persistent memory. Memory is the foundation of computer systems. The performance of almost all computer programs relies on memory for information storage and retrieval. Increasing capacity, performance, reliability, and energy efficiency of memory systems can benefit a number of applications. Hence, CEMSYS research is highly economically important, and will generate a high societal impact. By establishing CEMSYS at UC Merced (a minority-serving institute), we bring unique research and development opportunities to those minority students. CEMSYS will leverage demographic diversity in Merced (and the Central Valley in general) to mentor and develop a diverse, highly skilled, globally competitive engineering workforce. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.