A3PIM: An Automated, Analytic and Accurate Processing-in-Memory Offloader

The performance gap between memory and processor has grown rapidly. Consequently, the energy and wall-clock time costs associated with moving data between the CPU and main memory predominate the overall computational cost. The Processing-in-Memory (PIM) paradigm emerges as a promising architecture that mitigates the need for extensive data movements by strategically positioning computing units proximate to the memory.

Despite the abundant efforts devoted to building a robust and highly-available PIM system, identifying PIM-friendly segments of applications poses significant challenges due to the lack of a comprehensive tool to evaluate the intrinsic memory access pattern of the segment. To tackle this challenge, we propose A3PIM11The code and benchmarks of this work are opened-sourced in: https://github.com/ACSA-PIM/A3PIM: an Automated, Analytic and Accurate Processing-in-Memory offloader. We sys-tematically consider the cross-segment data movement and the intrinsic memory access pattern of each code segment via static code analyzer.

We evaluate A 3PIM across a wide range of real-world workloads including GAP and PrIM benchmarks and achieve an average speedup of 2.63x and 4.45x (up to 7.14x and lO.64x) when compared to CPU-only and PIM-only executions, respectively.