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arXiv · 1905.09822

In-DRAM Bulk Bitwise Execution Engine

Vivek Seshadri·Onur Mutlu
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Abstract

Many applications heavily use bitwise operations on large bitvectors as part of their computation. In existing systems, performing such bulk bitwise operations requires the processor to transfer a large amount of data on the memory channel, thereby consuming high latency, memory bandwidth, and energy. In this paper, we describe Ambit, a recently-proposed mechanism to perform bulk bitwise operations completely inside main memory. Ambit exploits the internal organization and analog operation of DRAM-based memory to achieve low cost, high performance, and low energy. Ambit exposes a new bulk bitwise execution model to the host processor. Evaluations show that Ambit significantly improves the performance of several applications that use bulk bitwise operations, including databases.

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Vivek Seshadri, Onur Mutlu. 2019-05-23. In-DRAM Bulk Bitwise Execution Engine. https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.09822

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