HAIL-DIMM: Host Access Interleaved with Near-Data Processing on DIMM-based Memory System

Near-data processing (NDP), a solution to reduce data movement overhead between host and memory, should not interfere with host access to ensure system fairness. We propose a cost-effective and energy-efficient LRDIMM-based NDP architecture (HAIL-DIMM) that can seamlessly interleave NDP and host access and is a drop-in replacement for existing main memory modules. The proposed NDP exploits the interleaving capability of the memory controller to interleave NDP and host access naturally. To take advantage of bank interleaving, an atomic operation of the proposed NDP, which consists of data movement and computation, is recognized by the memory controller as a DDR READ/WRITE but by the HAIL-DIMM as NDP based on the request's address. We implement a prototype of the proposed NDP architecture on an FPGA platform as proof of concept. The evaluation results show that the NDP system achieves up to 2.19x speedup in latency and up to 45.4% energy saving for data movement over the baseline system for memory-bound workloads.