PIM-DRAM: Accelerating Machine Learning Workloads using Processing in Commodity DRAM

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have transformed the field of machine learning and are widely deployed in many applications involving image, video, speech and natural language processing. The increasing compute demands of DNNs have been widely addressed through Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and specialized accelerators. However, as model sizes grow, these von Neumann architectures require very high memory bandwidth to keep the processing elements utilized as a majority of the data resides in the main memory. Processing in memory has been proposed as a promising solution for the memory wall bottleneck for ML workloads. In this work, we propose a new DRAM-based processing-in-memory (PIM) multiplication primitive coupled with intra-bank accumulation to accelerate matrix vector operations in ML workloads. The proposed multiplication primitive adds < 1% area overhead and does not require any change in the DRAM peripherals. Therefore, the proposed multiplication can be easily adopted in commodity DRAM chips. Subsequently, we design a DRAM-based PIM architecture, data mapping scheme and dataflow for executing DNNs within DRAM. System evaluations performed on networks like AlexNet, VGG16 and ResNet18 show that the proposed architecture, mapping, and data flow can provide up to 23x speedup over an NVIDIA Titan Xp GPU. Furthermore, it achieves upto 6.5x speedup over an ideal von Neumann architecture with infinite computational throughput, highlighting the need to overcome the memory bottleneck in future generations of DNN hardware.