BreakHammer: Enhancing RowHammer Mitigations by Carefully Throttling Suspect Threads

BreakHammer is a technique that reduces the performance overhead of RowHammer mitigation mechanisms by carefully reducing the number of performed RowHammer-preventive actions without compromising system robustness. Described in the MICRO 2024 paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.13477.

Repository File Structure

.
+-- ae_results/                     # Simulation results and plots (will be overwritten when new experiments are executed)
+-- cputraces/                      # CPU traces for 56 single-core workloads
+-- mixes/                          # Workload mixes
|   +-- microattack.mix/            # 51 workloads of varying memory intensities with an attacker present 
|   +-- microbenign.mix/            # 51 bening-only workloads
+-- plotting_scripts/               # Scripts to use extracted simulation statistics and create the plots in our paper
+-- scripts/                        # Scripts to post-process raw data and extract statistics for plotting
+-- src/                            # Ramulator2 source code
|   +-- dram_controller/
|   |   +--impl/plugin
|   |   |  +-- throttler.cpp        # Ramulator2 plugin that implements main BreakHammer functionality
|   ...
...
+-- README.md                       # This file

Installation Guide:

Prerequisites:

• Git
• g++ with c++20 capabilities (g++-10 or above recommended)
• Python3 (3.10 or above recommended)
• Podman (Optional)
  • We have tested Podman 4.5.1 on Ubuntu 22.04.1

Installation steps:

1. Clone the repository git clone https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/BreakHammer.git
2. Install python dependencies, build Ramulator2, and download traces with ./run_simple_test.sh¹

Example Use

1. Run Ramulator2 simulations ./run_with_slurm.sh or ./run_with_slurm_podman.sh². If you do not have Slurm use ./run_with_personalcomputer.sh instead
2. Wait for the simulations to finish. You can use ./check_run_status.sh to track simulation progress for multicore and singlecore runs (this script also creates intermediate scripts that can restart failed runs)
3. Parse simulation results and collects statistics with ./parse_results.sh
4. Generate figures with ./plot_all_figures.sh

Simulation Configuration Parameters

Execution of Ramulator2 simulations can be configured with the following configuration parameters. These parameters reside in scripts/run_config.py unless the parameter description below states a different path.

PERSONAL_RUN_THREADS: Number of parallel threads used to launch simulations with ./run_with_personalcomputer.sh

SLURM_USERNAME: Slurm username. Defaults to $USER

MAX_SLURM_JOBS: Maximum number of Slurm jobs submitted by the user allowed at any time

SLURM_SUBMIT_DELAY: Delay between submitting Slurm jobs (until job limit is reached)

SLURM_RETRY_DELAY: Delay between retrying to submit Slurm jobs (when job limit is reached)

AE_SLURM_PART_NAME: Job partition of the submitted Slurm jobs. This parameter is configurable in ./run_with_slurm.sh or ./run_with_slurm_podman.sh scripts

Contacts:

Oğuzhan Canpolat (aqwoguz [at] gmail [dot] com)

Footnotes

1. To start (or stop) using Podman, the repository should be rebuilt using ./run_simple_test.sh with (or without) podman run ↩

2. ./run_with_slurm_podman.sh can be executed without using Podman since the script launches Slurm jobs that use Podman. ↩