Excavating the Hidden Parallelism Inside DRAM Architectures With Buffered Compares
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The document proposes an approach called buffered compares that places a small buffer and simple ALU per DRAM bank to exploit parallelism inside DRAM architectures. It defines new DRAM commands to fill buffers, perform operations, and return results. This reduces processor-memory communication and accelerates applications by utilizing parallel compares across banks. Experimental results show significant performance and efficiency improvements on tested workloads. The approach can be implemented with minimal changes to existing DDR interfaces.
Excavating the Hidden Parallelism Inside DRAM Architectures With Buffered Compares
- 1. Excavating the Hidden Parallelism Inside DRAM Architectures With Buffered Compares ABSTRACT: We propose an approach called buffered compares, a less-invasive processing-in- memory solution that can be used with existing processor memory interfaces such as DDR3/4 with minimal changes. The approach is based on the observation that multibank architecture, a key feature of modern main memory DRAM devices, can be used to provide huge internal bandwidth without any major modification. We place a small buffer and a simple ALU per bank, define a set of new DRAM commands to fill the buffer and feed data to the ALU, and return the result for a set of commands (not for each command) to the host memory controller. By exploiting the under-utilized internal bandwidth using ‘compare-n-op’ operations, which are frequently used in various applications, we not only reduce the amount of energy inefficient processor–memory communication, but also accelerate the computation of big data processing applications by utilizing parallelism of the buffered compare units in DRAM banks. We present two versions of buffered compare architecture– full scale architecture and reduced architecture–in trade of performance and energy. The experimental results show that our solution significantly improves the performance and efficiency of the system on the tested workloads.
- 2. SOFTWARE IMPLEMENTATION: Modelsim Xilinx 14.2