Leviathan: A Unified System for General-Purpose Near-Data Computing

The rising cost of data movement poses a significant challenge to future computing systems. The call to arms for novel data-centric systems has spawned a wave of near-data computing (NDC) architectures that move compute closer to data. Despite large benefits promised by NDC, prior designs suffer from limited applicability and difficult programming.

This paper identifies the commonalities and differences across NDC designs to develop Leviathan, a unified architecture and programming interface for near-cache NDC. We build a taxonomy of NDC and identify the key dimensions as what, where, and when to compute. Leviathan provides a simple reactive-programming interface and automatically executes actions near data at the right time and place. The ability to integrate multiple NDC paradigms makes Leviathan the only general-purpose system to support a variety of specialized NDC designs. Across a range of NDC-specialized applications, Leviathan improves performance by 1.5×-3.7× and reduces energy by 22%-77% vs. a baseline multicore, while adding only ≈6% area compared to the last-level cache.