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1. Multi-Tenant In-memory Key-Value Cache Partitioning Using Efficient Random Sampling-Based LRU Model

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TCC.2023.3300889  

   Wang, Yuchen ; Yang, Junyao ; Wang, Zhenlin ( August 2023 , IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing)

   In-memory key-value caches are widely used as a performance-critical layer in web applications, disk-based storage, and distributed systems. The Least Recently Used (LRU) replacement policy has become the de facto standard in those systems since it exploits workload locality well. However, the LRU implementation can be costly due to the rigid data structure in maintaining object priority, as well as the locks for object order updating. Redis as one of the most effective and prevalent deployed commercial systems adopts an approximated LRU policy, where the least recently used item from a small, randomly sampled set of items is chosen to evict. This random sampling-based policy is lightweight and shows its flexibility. We observe that there can exist a significant miss ratio gap between exact LRU and random sampling-based LRU under different sampling size $K$ s. Therefore existing LRU miss ratio curve (MRC) construction techniques cannot be directly applied without loss of accuracy. In this paper, we introduce a new probabilistic stack algorithm named KRR to accurately model random sampling based-LRU, and extend it to handle both fixed and variable objects in key-value caches. We present an efficient stack update algorithm that reduces the expected running time of KRR significantly. To improve the performance of the in-memory multi-tenant key-value cache that utilizes random sampling-based replacement, we propose kRedis, a reference locality- and latency-aware memory partitioning scheme. kRedis guides the memory allocation among the tenants and dynamically customizes $K$ to better exploit the locality of each individual tenant. Evaluation results over diverse workloads show that our model generates accurate miss ratio curves for both fixed and variable object size workloads, and enables practical, low-overhead online MRC prediction. Equipped with KRR, kRedis delivers up to a 50.2% average access latency reduction, and up to a 262.8% throughput improvement compared to Redis. Furthermore, by comparing with pRedis, a state-of-the-art design of memory allocation in Redis, kRedis shows up to 24.8% and 61.8% improvements in average access latency and throughput, respectively. 

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2. TimeCache: Using Time to Eliminate Cache Side Channels when Sharing Software

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ISCA52012.2021.00037  

   Ojha, Divya ; Dwarkadas, Sandhya ( June 2021 , International Symposium on Computer Architecture)

   null (Ed.)

   Timing side channels have been used to extract cryptographic keys and sensitive documents even from trusted enclaves. Specifically, cache side channels created by reuse of shared code or data in the memory hierarchy have been exploited by several known attacks, e.g., evict+reload for recovering an RSA key and Spectre variants for leaking speculatively loaded data.In this paper, we present TimeCache, a cache design that incorporates knowledge of prior cache line access to eliminate cache side channels due to reuse of shared software (code and data). Our goal is to retain the benefits of a shared cache of allowing each process access to the entire cache and of cache occupancy by a single copy of shared software. We achieve our goal by implementing per-process cache line visibility so that the processes do not benefit from cached data brought in by another process until they have incurred a corresponding miss penalty. Our design achieves low overhead by using a novel combination of timestamps and a hardware design to allow efficient parallel comparisons of the timestamps. The solution works at all the cache levels without the need to limit the number of security domains, and defends against an attacker process running on the same core, on a another hyperthread, or on another core.Our implementation in the gem5 simulator demonstrates that the system is able to defend against RSA key extraction. We evaluate performance using SPEC2006 and PARSEC and observe the overhead of TimeCache to be 1.13% on average. Delay due to first access misses adds the majority of the overhead, with the security context bookkeeping incurred at the time of a context switch contributing 0.02% of the 1.13%. 

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3. A Benchmark Suite for Evaluating Caches' Vulnerability to Timing Attacks

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3373376.3378510  

   Deng, Shuwen ; Xiong, Wenjie ; Szefer, Jakub ( March 2020 , International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems)

   Based on improvements to an existing three-step model for cache timing-based attacks, this work presents 88Strongtypes of theoretical timing-based vulnerabilities in processor caches. It also presents and implements anew benchmark suite that can be used to test if processor cache is vulnerable to one of the attacks. In total,there are 1094 automatically-generated test programs which cover the 88Strongtheoretical vulnerabilities. The benchmark suite generates the Cache Timing Vulnerability Score (CTVS) which can be used to evaluate how vulnerable a specific cache implementation is to different attacks. A smaller CTVS means the design is more secure.Evaluation is conducted on commodity Intel and AMD processors and shows how the differences in processor implementations can result in different types of attacks that they are vulnerable to. Further, the benchmarks and the CTVS can be used in simulation to help designers of new secure processors and caches evaluate their designs’ susceptibility to cache timing-based attacks. 

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4. A Deep Learning-Based Real-time Seizure Detection System

   https://doi.org/10.1109/SPMB50085.2020.9353623  

   Shawki, N. ; Elseify, T. ; Cap, T. ; Shah, V. ; Obeid, I. ; Picone, J. ( December 2020 , Proceedings of the IEEE Signal Processing in Medicine and Biology Symposium (SPMB))

   Obeid, Iyad Selesnick (Ed.)

   Electroencephalography (EEG) is a popular clinical monitoring tool used for diagnosing brain-related disorders such as epilepsy [1]. As monitoring EEGs in a critical-care setting is an expensive and tedious task, there is a great interest in developing real-time EEG monitoring tools to improve patient care quality and efficiency [2]. However, clinicians require automatic seizure detection tools that provide decisions with at least 75% sensitivity and less than 1 false alarm (FA) per 24 hours [3]. Some commercial tools recently claim to reach such performance levels, including the Olympic Brainz Monitor [4] and Persyst 14 [5]. In this abstract, we describe our efforts to transform a high-performance offline seizure detection system [3] into a low latency real-time or online seizure detection system. An overview of the system is shown in Figure 1. The main difference between an online versus offline system is that an online system should always be causal and has minimum latency which is often defined by domain experts. The offline system, shown in Figure 2, uses two phases of deep learning models with postprocessing [3]. The channel-based long short term memory (LSTM) model (Phase 1 or P1) processes linear frequency cepstral coefficients (LFCC) [6] features from each EEG channel separately. We use the hypotheses generated by the P1 model and create additional features that carry information about the detected events and their confidence. The P2 model uses these additional features and the LFCC features to learn the temporal and spatial aspects of the EEG signals using a hybrid convolutional neural network (CNN) and LSTM model. Finally, Phase 3 aggregates the results from both P1 and P2 before applying a final postprocessing step. The online system implements Phase 1 by taking advantage of the Linux piping mechanism, multithreading techniques, and multi-core processors. To convert Phase 1 into an online system, we divide the system into five major modules: signal preprocessor, feature extractor, event decoder, postprocessor, and visualizer. The system reads 0.1-second frames from each EEG channel and sends them to the feature extractor and the visualizer. The feature extractor generates LFCC features in real time from the streaming EEG signal. Next, the system computes seizure and background probabilities using a channel-based LSTM model and applies a postprocessor to aggregate the detected events across channels. The system then displays the EEG signal and the decisions simultaneously using a visualization module. The online system uses C++, Python, TensorFlow, and PyQtGraph in its implementation. The online system accepts streamed EEG data sampled at 250 Hz as input. The system begins processing the EEG signal by applying a TCP montage [8]. Depending on the type of the montage, the EEG signal can have either 22 or 20 channels. To enable the online operation, we send 0.1-second (25 samples) length frames from each channel of the streamed EEG signal to the feature extractor and the visualizer. Feature extraction is performed sequentially on each channel. The signal preprocessor writes the sample frames into two streams to facilitate these modules. In the first stream, the feature extractor receives the signals using stdin. In parallel, as a second stream, the visualizer shares a user-defined file with the signal preprocessor. This user-defined file holds raw signal information as a buffer for the visualizer. The signal preprocessor writes into the file while the visualizer reads from it. Reading and writing into the same file poses a challenge. The visualizer can start reading while the signal preprocessor is writing into it. To resolve this issue, we utilize a file locking mechanism in the signal preprocessor and visualizer. Each of the processes temporarily locks the file, performs its operation, releases the lock, and tries to obtain the lock after a waiting period. The file locking mechanism ensures that only one process can access the file by prohibiting other processes from reading or writing while one process is modifying the file [9]. The feature extractor uses circular buffers to save 0.3 seconds or 75 samples from each channel for extracting 0.2-second or 50-sample long center-aligned windows. The module generates 8 absolute LFCC features where the zeroth cepstral coefficient is replaced by a temporal domain energy term. For extracting the rest of the features, three pipelines are used. The differential energy feature is calculated in a 0.9-second absolute feature window with a frame size of 0.1 seconds. The difference between the maximum and minimum temporal energy terms is calculated in this range. Then, the first derivative or the delta features are calculated using another 0.9-second window. Finally, the second derivative or delta-delta features are calculated using a 0.3-second window [6]. The differential energy for the delta-delta features is not included. In total, we extract 26 features from the raw sample windows which add 1.1 seconds of delay to the system. We used the Temple University Hospital Seizure Database (TUSZ) v1.2.1 for developing the online system [10]. The statistics for this dataset are shown in Table 1. A channel-based LSTM model was trained using the features derived from the train set using the online feature extractor module. A window-based normalization technique was applied to those features. In the offline model, we scale features by normalizing using the maximum absolute value of a channel [11] before applying a sliding window approach. Since the online system has access to a limited amount of data, we normalize based on the observed window. The model uses the feature vectors with a frame size of 1 second and a window size of 7 seconds. We evaluated the model using the offline P1 postprocessor to determine the efficacy of the delayed features and the window-based normalization technique. As shown by the results of experiments 1 and 4 in Table 2, these changes give us a comparable performance to the offline model. The online event decoder module utilizes this trained model for computing probabilities for the seizure and background classes. These posteriors are then postprocessed to remove spurious detections. The online postprocessor receives and saves 8 seconds of class posteriors in a buffer for further processing. It applies multiple heuristic filters (e.g., probability threshold) to make an overall decision by combining events across the channels. These filters evaluate the average confidence, the duration of a seizure, and the channels where the seizures were observed. The postprocessor delivers the label and confidence to the visualizer. The visualizer starts to display the signal as soon as it gets access to the signal file, as shown in Figure 1 using the “Signal File” and “Visualizer” blocks. Once the visualizer receives the label and confidence for the latest epoch from the postprocessor, it overlays the decision and color codes that epoch. The visualizer uses red for seizure with the label SEIZ and green for the background class with the label BCKG. Once the streaming finishes, the system saves three files: a signal file in which the sample frames are saved in the order they were streamed, a time segmented event (TSE) file with the overall decisions and confidences, and a hypotheses (HYP) file that saves the label and confidence for each epoch. The user can plot the signal and decisions using the signal and HYP files with only the visualizer by enabling appropriate options. For comparing the performance of different stages of development, we used the test set of TUSZ v1.2.1 database. It contains 1015 EEG records of varying duration. The any-overlap performance [12] of the overall system shown in Figure 2 is 40.29% sensitivity with 5.77 FAs per 24 hours. For comparison, the previous state-of-the-art model developed on this database performed at 30.71% sensitivity with 6.77 FAs per 24 hours [3]. The individual performances of the deep learning phases are as follows: Phase 1’s (P1) performance is 39.46% sensitivity and 11.62 FAs per 24 hours, and Phase 2 detects seizures with 41.16% sensitivity and 11.69 FAs per 24 hours. We trained an LSTM model with the delayed features and the window-based normalization technique for developing the online system. Using the offline decoder and postprocessor, the model performed at 36.23% sensitivity with 9.52 FAs per 24 hours. The trained model was then evaluated with the online modules. The current performance of the overall online system is 45.80% sensitivity with 28.14 FAs per 24 hours. Table 2 summarizes the performances of these systems. The performance of the online system deviates from the offline P1 model because the online postprocessor fails to combine the events as the seizure probability fluctuates during an event. The modules in the online system add a total of 11.1 seconds of delay for processing each second of the data, as shown in Figure 3. In practice, we also count the time for loading the model and starting the visualizer block. When we consider these facts, the system consumes 15 seconds to display the first hypothesis. The system detects seizure onsets with an average latency of 15 seconds. Implementing an automatic seizure detection model in real time is not trivial. We used a variety of techniques such as the file locking mechanism, multithreading, circular buffers, real-time event decoding, and signal-decision plotting to realize the system. A video demonstrating the system is available at: https://www.isip.piconepress.com/projects/nsf_pfi_tt/resources/videos/realtime_eeg_analysis/v2.5.1/video_2.5.1.mp4. The final conference submission will include a more detailed analysis of the online performance of each module. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Research reported in this publication was most recently supported by the National Science Foundation Partnership for Innovation award number IIP-1827565 and the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Universal Research Enhancement Program (PA CURE). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official views of any of these organizations. REFERENCES [1] A. Craik, Y. He, and J. L. Contreras-Vidal, “Deep learning for electroencephalogram (EEG) classification tasks: a review,” J. Neural Eng., vol. 16, no. 3, p. 031001, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1088/1741-2552/ab0ab5. [2] A. C. Bridi, T. Q. Louro, and R. C. L. Da Silva, “Clinical Alarms in intensive care: implications of alarm fatigue for the safety of patients,” Rev. Lat. Am. Enfermagem, vol. 22, no. 6, p. 1034, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1590/0104-1169.3488.2513. [3] M. Golmohammadi, V. Shah, I. Obeid, and J. Picone, “Deep Learning Approaches for Automatic Seizure Detection from Scalp Electroencephalograms,” in Signal Processing in Medicine and Biology: Emerging Trends in Research and Applications, 1st ed., I. Obeid, I. Selesnick, and J. Picone, Eds. New York, New York, USA: Springer, 2020, pp. 233–274. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36844-9_8. [4] “CFM Olympic Brainz Monitor.” [Online]. Available: https://newborncare.natus.com/products-services/newborn-care-products/newborn-brain-injury/cfm-olympic-brainz-monitor. [Accessed: 17-Jul-2020]. [5] M. L. Scheuer, S. B. Wilson, A. Antony, G. Ghearing, A. Urban, and A. I. Bagic, “Seizure Detection: Interreader Agreement and Detection Algorithm Assessments Using a Large Dataset,” J. Clin. Neurophysiol., 2020. https://doi.org/10.1097/WNP.0000000000000709. [6] A. Harati, M. Golmohammadi, S. Lopez, I. Obeid, and J. Picone, “Improved EEG Event Classification Using Differential Energy,” in Proceedings of the IEEE Signal Processing in Medicine and Biology Symposium, 2015, pp. 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1109/SPMB.2015.7405421. [7] V. Shah, C. Campbell, I. Obeid, and J. Picone, “Improved Spatio-Temporal Modeling in Automated Seizure Detection using Channel-Dependent Posteriors,” Neurocomputing, 2021. [8] W. Tatum, A. Husain, S. Benbadis, and P. Kaplan, Handbook of EEG Interpretation. New York City, New York, USA: Demos Medical Publishing, 2007. [9] D. P. Bovet and C. Marco, Understanding the Linux Kernel, 3rd ed. O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2005. https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/understanding-the-linux/0596005652/. [10] V. Shah et al., “The Temple University Hospital Seizure Detection Corpus,” Front. Neuroinform., vol. 12, pp. 1–6, 2018. https://doi.org/10.3389/fninf.2018.00083. [11] F. Pedregosa et al., “Scikit-learn: Machine Learning in Python,” J. Mach. Learn. Res., vol. 12, pp. 2825–2830, 2011. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1953048.2078195. [12] J. Gotman, D. Flanagan, J. Zhang, and B. Rosenblatt, “Automatic seizure detection in the newborn: Methods and initial evaluation,” Electroencephalogr. Clin. Neurophysiol., vol. 103, no. 3, pp. 356–362, 1997. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0013-4694(97)00003-9. 

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5. MemHC: An Optimized GPU Memory Management Framework for Accelerating Many-body Correlation

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3506705  

   Wang, Qihan ; Peng, Zhen ; Ren, Bin ; Chen, Jie ; Edwards, Robert G. ( June 2022 , ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization)

   The many-body correlation function is a fundamental computation kernel in modern physics computing applications, e.g., Hadron Contractions in Lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD). This kernel is both computation and memory intensive, involving a series of tensor contractions, and thus usually runs on accelerators like GPUs. Existing optimizations on many-body correlation mainly focus on individual tensor contractions (e.g., cuBLAS libraries and others). In contrast, this work discovers a new optimization dimension for many-body correlation by exploring the optimization opportunities among tensor contractions. More specifically, it targets general GPU architectures (both NVIDIA and AMD) and optimizes many-body correlation’s memory management by exploiting a set of memory allocation and communication redundancy elimination opportunities: first, GPU memory allocation redundancy : the intermediate output frequently occurs as input in the subsequent calculations; second, CPU-GPU communication redundancy : although all tensors are allocated on both CPU and GPU, many of them are used (and reused) on the GPU side only, and thus, many CPU/GPU communications (like that in existing Unified Memory designs) are unnecessary; third, GPU oversubscription: limited GPU memory size causes oversubscription issues, and existing memory management usually results in near-reuse data eviction, thus incurring extra CPU/GPU memory communications. Targeting these memory optimization opportunities, this article proposes MemHC, an optimized systematic GPU memory management framework that aims to accelerate the calculation of many-body correlation functions utilizing a series of new memory reduction designs. These designs involve optimizations for GPU memory allocation, CPU/GPU memory movement, and GPU memory oversubscription, respectively. More specifically, first, MemHC employs duplication-aware management and lazy release of GPU memories to corresponding host managing for better data reusability. Second, it implements data reorganization and on-demand synchronization to eliminate redundant (or unnecessary) data transfer. Third, MemHC exploits an optimized Least Recently Used (LRU) eviction policy called Pre-Protected LRU to reduce evictions and leverage memory hits. Additionally, MemHC is portable for various platforms including NVIDIA GPUs and AMD GPUs. The evaluation demonstrates that MemHC outperforms unified memory management by \( 2.18\times \) to \( 10.73\times \) . The proposed Pre-Protected LRU policy outperforms the original LRU policy by up to \( 1.36\times \) improvement. 1 

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