DRCTL: A Disorder-Resistant Computation Translation Layer Enhancing the Lifetime and Performance of Memristive CIM Architecture

The memristive Computing-in-Memory (CIM) sys-tem can efficiently accelerate matrix-vector multiplication (MVM) operations through in-situ computing. The data layout has a significant impact on the communication performance of CIM systems. Existing software-level communication opti-mizations aim to reduce communication distance by carefully designing static data layouts, while wear-leveling (WL) and error mitigation methods use dynamic scheduling to enhance system reliability, resulting in randomized data layouts and increased communication overhead. Besides, existing CIM compilers di-rectly map data to physical crossbars and generate instructions, which causes inconvenience for dynamic scheduling. To address these challenges of balancing communication performance and reliability while coordinating existing CIM compilers and dy-namic scheduling, we propose a disorder-resistant computation translation layer (DRCTL), which improves system lifetime and communication performance through co-optimization of data layout and dynamic scheduling. It consists of three parts: (1) We propose an address conversion method for dynamic scheduling, which updates the addresses in the instruction stream after dynamic scheduling, thereby avoiding recompilation. (2) Dynamic scheduling strategy for reliability improvement. We propose a hierarchical wear-leveling (HWL) strategy, which reduces communication by increasing scheduling granularity. (3) Communication optimization for dynamic scheduling. We propose data layout-aware selective remapping (LASR), which helps dynamic scheduling methods improve communication lo-cality and reduce latency by exploiting data dependencies. The experiments demonstrate that HWL extends lifetime by 100.3-205.9 x compared to not using WL. Even with a slight lifetime decrease compared to the state-of-the-art WL (TIWL), it still supports continuous neural network training for 7 years. After applying LASR to HWL, the number of execution cycles, energy consumption, on-chip and off-chip NoC accesses decrease by an average of 26.91 %, 26.88%, 36.41 %, and 80.62%, respectively.