ABACuS: All-Bank Activation Counters for Scalable and Low Overhead RowHammer Mitigation

ABACuS is a new RowHammer mitigation mechanism that prevents RowHammer bitflips at low area, performance, and energy overheads for modern and future DRAM chips that are very vulnerable to RowHammer (e.g., with hammer counts as low as 125 inducing bitflips).

DALL-E's picture of ABACuS

Cite ABACuS

Please cite the following paper if you find ABACuS useful:

A. Olgun, Y. C. Tugrul, N. Bostanci, I. E. Yuksel, H. Luo, S. Rhyner, A. G. Yaglikci, G. F. Oliveira, O. Mutlu, "ABACuS: All-Bank Activation Counters for Scalable and Low Overhead RowHammer Mitigation", To appear in USENIX Security 2024, August 2024.

Link to the PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.09977.pdf

BibTeX format for your convenience:

@inproceedings{olgun2024abacus,
      title={{ABACuS: All-Bank Activation Counters for Scalable and Low Overhead RowHammer Mitigation}}, 
      author={Olgun, Ataberk and Tugrul, Yahya Can and Bostanci, Nisa and Yuksel, Ismail Emir and Luo, Haocong and Rhyner, Steve and Yaglikci, A. Giray and Oliveira, Geraldo F. and Mutlu, Onur},
      year={2024},
      booktitle={USENIX Security}
}

Repository File Structure

.
+-- abacus_cacti/                   # Area, power, and energy analyses sources
+-- abacus_verilog/                 # Verilog HDL sources for ABACuS hardware design
+-- configs/ABACuS/                 # Ramulator configurations for ABACuS and other state-of-the-art mechanisms
|   +-- AttackPresent/              # Configurations used in simulating adversarial workloads
|   +-- Others/                     # Configurations for four state-of-the-art mechanisms
|   +-- ABACUS/                     # Configurations for ABACuS
|   +-- Revision/                   # Configurations for ABACuS-Big (see Section 9.4 in our paper)           
+-- cputraces/                      # CPU traces for 62 single-core workloads
+-- ext/                            # External dependencies
+-- scripts/                        # Scripts to post process raw data and create the plots in our paper
+-- src/                            # Ramulator source code
|   +-- RowHammer/                  # Source code of ABACUS and four other state-of-the-art mitigation mechanisms
|   ...
...
+-- README.md                       # This file

Installation Guide:

Prerequisites:

• Podman
  • We have tested Podman 3.4.4 on Ubuntu 22.04.1
• Git

Installation steps:

1. Clone the repository git clone -b usenix24-ae git@github.com:CMU-SAFARI/ABACuS.git

Example Use

If you do not have slurm

1. Run ramulator simulations ./run_artifact_with_podman.sh --personalcomputer
2. Run the figure creator script ./create_figures_with_podman.sh

If you already have slurm

1. Run ramulator simulations ./run_artifact_with_podman.sh --slurm
2. Navigate to scripts/ and run the figure creator script python3 create_figures.py

Reproducing area, power, and energy results

We model ABACuS, Graphene, and Hydra's area, power, and energy cost using CACTI. These results are reproduced by running ./area_results_with_podman.sh.

Verilog HDL Implementation

We implement ABACuS's hardware design in Verilog to faithfully measure its circuit latency. The Verilog implementation is under abacus_verilog/. You may use the abacus_verilog/dc.tcl script to launch Synopsys (synthesis) analysis runs.

Generating workload memory access traces

We use the trace generator tool provided in Ramulator's open source repository to generate our workload memory access traces. We refer the reader to the linked repository for trace generation instructions. We configure the trace generator tool as follows.

    L1 D$ size  = 65536 bytes
    L1 D$ associativity = 8 ways

    L2 D$ size = 2097152 bytes
    L2 D$ associativity = 8 ways

|-------------------|-----------------------------------------------------|
| Interval size     | 200m                                                |
| Trace type        | cpu                                                 |
| Instruction fetch | Disabled                                            |
| Address type      | Virtual                                             |
| Simulation type   | Fast (Selected the interval with the most weight)   |

We run the trace generation tool in a host system with an Intel Xeon Gold 5118 processor.

Contacts:

Ataberk Olgun (ataberk.olgun [at] safari [dot] ethz [dot] ch)
Nisa Bostanci (nisa.bostanci [at] safari [dot] ethz [dot] ch)