In-Memory Computing Accelerator for Iterative Linear Algebra Solvers

Iterative linear solvers are a crucial kernel in many numerical analysis problems. The performance and energy efficiency of iterative solvers based on traditional architectures are severely constrained by the memory wall bottleneck. Computing-in-memory (CIM) has the potential to enhance solving efficiency. Existing CIM architectures are mostly customized for specific algorithms and primarily focus on handling fixed-point operations, which makes them difficult to meet the demands of diverse and high-precision applications. In this work, we propose a CIM architecture that natively supports various iterative linear solvers based on floating-point operations. We develop a new instruction set for the accelerator, which can be flexibly combined to implement various iterative solvers. The evaluation results show that, compared with the GPU implementation, our accelerator achieves more than 10.1× speedup and 6.8× energy savings when executing different iterative solvers.