TUPIM: A Transparent and Universal Processing-in-Memory Architecture for Unmodified Binaries

Abstract

Recently, processing-in-memory (PIM) is gaining much attention because it could minimize data movement by conducting computation in memory. Existing PIM solutions require a number of additional procedures during the setup-time, including code re-writing and re-compiling, code annotations, and detailed program profiling, etc. These requirements, however, potentially prevent existing executable binaries benefiting from PIM architectures. For old binary legacies without any source code, it is impossible to run them on existing PIM architectures. To solve these challenges, we propose a transparent and universal PIM (TUPIM), a novel PIM architecture that can execute unmodified binaries and at the same time take advantages of PIM. TUPIM is a significant advance over the state-of-the-art because it transparently expends the scope of PIM to deploy all applications without any source code, programming models, or compiler modifications. Experiments show that TUPIM can get 2.2x speedup on average (up to 3.67x) and 15.7% energy reduction, compared with conventional CPU-only executions.