A General Offloading Approach for Near-DRAM Processing-In-Memory Architectures

Processing-in-memory (PIM) is promising to solve the well-known data movement challenge by performing in-situ computations near the data. Leveraging PIM features is pretty profitable to boost the energy efficiency of applications. Early studies mainly focus on improving the programmability for computation offloading on PIM architectures. They lack a comprehensive analysis of computation locality and hence fail to accelerate a wide variety of applications. In this paper, we present a general-purpose instruction-level offloading technique for near-DRAM PIM architectures, namely IOTPIM, to exploit PIM features comprehensively. IOTPIM is novel with two technical advances: 1) a new instruction offloading policy that fully considers the locality of the whole on-chip cache hierarchy, and 2) an offloading performance benefit prediction model that directly predicts offloading performance benefits of an instruction based on the input dataset characterizes, preserving low analysis overheads. The evaluation demonstrates that IOTPIM can be applied to accelerate a wide variety of applications, including graph processing, machine learning, and image processing. IOT-PIM outperforms the state-of-the-art PIM offloading techniques by 1.28×-1.51× while ensuring offloading accuracy as high as 91.89% on average.