PRIME: a Novel Processing-In-Memory Architecture for Neural Network Computation in Reram-Based Main Memory
PRIME: A Novel Processing-in-memory Architecture for Neural Network Computation in ReRAM-based Main Memory Ping Chi∗, Shuangchen Li∗, Cong Xu†, Tao Zhang‡, Jishen Zhao§, Yongpan Liu¶,YuWang¶ and Yuan Xie∗ ∗Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA †HP Labs, Palo Alto, CA 94304, USA; ‡NVIDIA Corporation, Santa Clara, CA 95950, USA §Department of Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA ¶Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China ∗Email: {pingchi, shuangchenli, yuanxie}@ece.ucsb.edu Abstract—Processing-in-memory (PIM) is a promising so- by leveraging 3D memory technologies [6] to integrate lution to address the “memory wall” challenges for future computation logic with the memory. computer systems. Prior proposed PIM architectures put ad- Recent work demonstrated that some emerging non- ditional computation logic in or near memory. The emerging metal-oxide resistive random access memory (ReRAM) has volatile memories, such as metal-oxide resistive random showed its potential to be used for main memory. Moreover, access memory (ReRAM) [7], spin-transfer torque mag- with its crossbar array structure, ReRAM can perform matrix- netic RAM (STT-RAM) [8], and phase change memory vector multiplication efficiently, and has been widely studied to (PCM) [9], have the capability of performing logic and accelerate neural network (NN) applications. In this work, we arithmetic operations beyond data storage. This allows the propose a novel PIM architecture, called PRIME, to accelerate NN applications in ReRAM based main memory. In PRIME, memory to serve both computation and memory functions, a portion of ReRAM crossbar arrays can be configured as promising a radical renovation of the relationship between accelerators for NN applications or as normal memory for a computation and memory.
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