Gookhoon Kim
Pohang University of Science and Technology · Computer Science
About the Lab
Professor Gookhoon Kim's research lab focuses on computer architecture and system-level optimization, with a strong emphasis on addressing memory bandwidth bottlenecks in modern computing systems. The lab explores innovative 3D-stacked memory architectures, Near-Data Processing (NDP), and specialized interconnect designs—such as memory-centric networks and HMC-based systems—to enhance performance and energy efficiency. Key research directions include intelligent workload offloading to processing-in-memory units, scalable data mapping across multiple memory stacks, and power-aware on-chip network design. The lab also investigates hardware-software co-design for emerging workloads like large language models, particularly in accelerating bandwidth-intensive operations like GEMV computations.
Research Overview
Research Output Trend
Figures are computed from collected data and may differ slightly.
Selected Papers
15Main memory bandwidth is a critical bottleneck for modern GPU systems due to limited off-chip pin bandwidth. 3D-stacked memory architectures provide a promising opportunity to significantly alleviate this bottleneck by directly connecting a logic layer to the DRAM layers with high bandwidth connections. Recent work has shown promising potential performance benefits from an architecture that connects multiple such 3D-stacked memories and offloads bandwidth-intensive computations to a GPU in each
Memory bandwidth has been one of the most critical system performance bottlenecks. As a result, the HMC (Hybrid Memory Cube) has recently been proposed to improve DRAM bandwidth as well as energy efficiency. In this paper, we explore different system interconnect designs with HMCs. We show that processor-centric network architectures cannot fully utilize processor bandwidth across different traffic patterns. Thus, we propose a memory-centric network in which all processor channels are connected
Modern transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) are constructed with a series of decoder blocks. Each block comprises three key components: (1) QKV generation, (2) multi-head attention, and (3) feed-forward networks. In batched processing, QKV generation and feed-forward networks involve compute-intensive matrix-matrix multiplications (GEMM), while multi-head attention requires bandwidth-heavy matrix-vector multiplications (GEMV). Machine learning accelerators like TPUs or NPUs are profici
Main memory bandwidth is a critical bottleneck for modern GPU systems due to limited off-chip pin bandwidth. 3D-stacked memory architectures provide a promising opportunity to significantly alleviate this bottleneck by directly connecting a logic layer to the DRAM layers with high bandwidth connections. Recent work has shown promising potential performance benefits from an architecture that connects multiple such 3D-stacked memories and offloads bandwidth-intensive computations to a GPU in each
The increasing number of integrated components on a single chip has increased the importance of on-chip networks. A significant part of on-chip network routers is the buffer, as it occupies a large area and consumes a significant amount of power. In this work, we propose FlexiBuffer, a microarchitecture in which we minimize buffer leakage power by using fine-grained power gating and adjusting the size of the active buffers adaptively. We propose two microarchitecture techniques to support fine-g
3D-stacked memory devices with processing logic can help alleviate the memory bandwidth bottleneck in GPUs. However, in order for such Near-Data Processing (NDP) memory stacks to be used for different GPU architectures, it is desirable to standardize the NDP architecture. Our proposal enables this standardization by allowing data to be spread across multiple memory stacks as is the norm in high-performance systems without an MMU on the NDP stack. The keys to this architecture are the ability to
Accurately estimating congestion for proper global adaptive routing decisions (i.e., determine whether a packet should be routed minimally or non-minimally) has a significant impact on overall performance for high-radix topologies, such as the Dragonfly topology. Prior work have focused on understanding near-end congestion - i.e., congestion that occurs at the current router - or downstream congestion - i.e., congestion that occurs in downstream routers. However, most prior work do not evaluate
GPUs are being widely used to accelerate different workloads and multi-GPU systems can provide higher performance with multiple discrete GPUs interconnected together. However, there are two main communication bottlenecks in multi-GPU systems -- accessing remote GPU memory and the communication between GPU and the host CPU. Recent advances in multi-GPU programming, including unified virtual addressing and unified memory from NVIDIA, has made programming simpler but the costly remote memory access
Recent technology advances in memory system design, along with 3D stacking, have made near-data processing (NDP) more feasible to accelerate different workloads. In this work, we explore the near-data processing opportunity of a fundamental operation - linked-list traversal (LLT). We propose a new NDP architecture which does not change the existing sequential programming model and does not require any modification to the core microarchitecture. Instead, we exploit the packetized interface betwee
Memory bandwidth has been one of the most critical system performance bottlenecks. As a result, the HMC (Hybrid Memory Cube) has recently been proposed to improve DRAM bandwidth as well as energy efficiency. In this paper, we explore different system interconnect designs with HMCs. We show that processor-centric network architectures cannot fully utilize processor bandwidth across different traffic patterns. Thus, we propose a memory-centric network in which all processor channels are connected
Thread or warp scheduling in GPGPUs has been shown to have a significant impact on overall performance. Recently proposed warp schedulers have been based on a greedy warp scheduler where some warps are prioritized over other warps. However, a single warp scheduling policy does not necessarily provide good performance across all types of workloads; in particular, we show that greedy warp schedulers are not necessarily optimal for workloads with inter-warp locality while a simple round-robin warp
Global adaptive routing exploits non-minimal paths to improve performance on adversarial traffic patterns and load-balance network channels in large-scale networks. However, most prior work on global adaptive routing have assumed admissible traffic pattern where no endpoint node is oversubscribed. In the presence of a greedy flow or hotspot traffic, we show how exploiting path diversity with global adaptive routing can spread network congestion and degrade performance. When global adaptive routi
A cost-efficient network-on-chip is needed in a scalable many-core systems. Recent multicore processors have leveraged a ring topology and hierarchical ring can increase scalability but presents different challenges, including higher hop count and global ring bottleneck. In this work, we describe a hierarchical ring topology that we refer to as a transportation-network-inspired network-on-chip (tNoC) that leverages principles from transportation network systems. In particular, we propose a novel
Emerging Compute Express Link (CXL) enables cost-efficient memory expansion beyond the local DRAM of processors. While its CXL.mem protocol provides minimal latency overhead through an optimized protocol stack, frequent CXL memory accesses can result in significant slowdowns for memory-bound applications whether they are latency-sensitive or bandwidth-intensive. The near-data processing (NDP) in the CXL controller promises to overcome such limitations of passive CXL memory. However, prior work o
Global adaptive routing exploits non-minimal paths to improve performance on adversarial traffic patterns and load-balance network channels in large-scale networks. However, most prior work on global adaptive routing have assumed admissible traffic pattern where no endpoint node is oversubscribed. In the presence of a greedy flow or hotspot traffic, we show how exploiting path diversity with global adaptive routing can spread network congestion and degrade performance. When global adaptive routi
Research Areas
Dive deeper into Gookhoon Kim's research on Nubint
Open this lab's papers in the app to read with AI, summarize, and cite in your writing.