Application Characterization for Near Memory Processing
Maryam S. Hosseini, Masoumeh Ebrahimi, Pooria M. Yaghini, Nader Bagherzadeh · 2021
Data movement between memory subsystem and processor unit is a crippling performance and energy bottleneck for data-intensive applications. Near Memory Processing (NMP) is a promising solution to alleviate the data movement bottleneck. The introduction of 3D-stacked memories and more importantly hybrid memory systems enable the long-wished NMP capability. This work explores the feasibility and efficacy of having NMP on the hybrid memory system for a given set of applications. In this paper, we first redefine a set of NMP-centric performance metrics in order to analyze the efficacy of a given processing unit. Leveraging the proposed metrics, we characterize various sets of applications to assess the suitability of a processing unit in terms of performance. Specifically, in this work we motivate the efficiency of NMP subsystems to process memory-intensive applications when 3D-NVM technologies are employed.