Emulation of processing in memory architecture for application development

Abstract

Since the new technologies like big data and cloud computing require tremendous amount of transactions between processors and memory, researches on a new memory system called Processing in Memory (PIM) architecture has been suggested as a solution for those memory intensive applications. To make software utilize the new architecture, a development environment with tool chain and debug infrastructures supplementing extended instruction sets and target emulation is needed. This paper introduces a way to emulate a target platform having PIM architecture memory device. The emulated platform may use the PIM device as a system memory or simple memory mapped bus device. The actual PIM architecture is implemented in both cycle-based memory simulator and FPGA based hardware platform. The emulator has a bridge for these implementations so the emulated target platform may be freely used with early stage application development for the PIM architecture.