PIMCOMP: An End-to-End DNN Compiler for Processing-In-Memory Accelerators

In the past decade, various processing-in-memory (PIM) accelerators based on various devices, micro-architectures, and interfaces have been proposed to accelerate deep neural networks (DNNs). How to deploy DNNs onto PIM-based accelerators is the key to explore PIM’s high performance and energy efficiency. The scale of DNN models, the diversity of PIM accelerators, and the complexity of deployment are far beyond the human deployment capability. Hence, an automatic deployment methodology is indispensable. In this work, we propose PIMCOMP, an end-to-end DNN compiler tailored for PIM accelerators, achieving efficient deployment of DNN models on PIM hardware. PIMCOMP can adapt to various PIM architectures by using an abstract configurable PIM accelerator template with a set of pseudo instructions, which is a high-level abstraction of the hardware’s fundamental functionalities. Through a generic multilevel optimization framework, PIMCOMP realizes an end-to-end conversion from a high-level DNN description to pseudo instructions, which can be further converted to specific hardware intrinsics/primitives. The compilation addresses two critical issues in PIM-accelerated inference from a system perspective: 1) resource utilization and 2) dataflow scheduling. PIMCOMP adopts a flexible unfolding format to reshape and partition convolutional layers, adopts a weight-layout guided computation-storage-mapping approach to enhance resource utilization, and balances the system’s computation, memory access, and communication characteristics. For dataflow scheduling, we design two scheduling algorithms with different interlayer pipeline granularities to support varying application scenarios while ensuring high-computational parallelism. Experiments demonstrate that PIMCOMP improves throughput, latency, and energy efficiency across various architectures. PIMCOMP is open-sourced at https://github.com/sunxt99/PIMCOMP-NN.