Providing Plug N' Play for Processing-in-Memory Accelerators
Paulo C. Santos, Bruno Forlin, Luigi Carro · 2021
Although Processing-in-Memory (PIM) emerged as a solution to avoid unnecessary and expensive data movements to/from host and accelerators, their widespread usage is still difficult, given that to effectively use a PIM device, huge and costly modifications must be done at the host processor side to allow instructions offloading, cache coherence, virtual memory management, and communication between different PIM instances. The present work addresses these challenges by presenting non-invasive solutions for those requirements. We demonstrate that, at compile-time, and without any host modifications or programmer intervention, it is possible to exploit already available resources to allow efficient host and PIM communication and task partitioning, without disturbing neither host nor memory hierarchy. We present Plug&PIM, a plug n' play strategy for PIM adoption with minimal performance penalties.