Monday, October 18, 2021

Ayudante: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach to Assist Persistent Memory Programming

(Hanxian Huang, UCSD, presenting on Wednesday, October 20, 2021 at 1:00pm and 7:00pm ET) 

Programming PM imposes non-trivial labor effort on writing code to adopt new PM-aware libraries and APIs. In addition, non-expert PM code can be error-prone. In order to ease the burden of PM programmers, we propose Ayudante, a deep reinforcement learning (RL)- based PM programming assistant framework consisting of two key components: a deep RL-based PM code generator and a code refining pipeline. Given a piece of C, C++, or Java source code developed for conventional volatile memory systems, our code generator automatically generates the corresponding PM code and checks its data persistence. The code refining pipeline parses the generated code to provide a report for further program testing and performance optimization. Our evaluation on an Intel server equipped with Optane DC PM demonstrates that both microbenchmark programs and a key-value store application generated by Ayudante pass PMDK checkers. Performance evaluation on the microbenchmarks shows that the generated code achieves comparable speedup and memory access performance as PMDK code examples.