Mapping irregular applications to DIVA, a PIM-based data-intensive architecture
Mary W. Hall, Peter Michael Kogge, J.G. Koller, Pedro C. Diniz, Jacqueline Chame, Jeff Draper, Jeff LaCoss, John J. Granacki, Jay B. Brockman, Apoorv Srivastava, W.C. Athas, Vincent W. Freeh, Jaewook Shin, Joonseok Park · 1999
Processing-in-memory (PIM) chips that integrate processor logic into memory devices offer a new opportunity for bridging the growing gap between processor and memory speeds, especially for applications with high memory-bandwidth requirements.The Data-IntensiVe Architecture (DIVA) system combines PIM memories with one or more external host processors and a PIM-to-PIM interconnect.DIVA increases memory bandwidth through two mechanisms: (1) performing selected computation in memory, reducing the quantity of data transferred across the processor-memory interface; and (2) providing communication mechanisms called parcels for moving both data and computation throughout memory, further bypassing the processor-memory bus.DIVA uniquely supports acceleration of important irregular applications, including sparse-matrix and pointer-based computations.In this paper, we focus on several aspects of DIVA designed to effectively support such computations at very high performance levels: (1) the memory model and parcel definitions; (2) the PIM-to-PIM interconnect; and, (3) requirements for the processor-to-memory interface.We demonstrate the potential of PIMbased architectures in accelerating the performance of three irregular computations, sparse conjugate gradient, a natural-join database operation and an object-oriented database query.