PIMProf: An Automated Program Profiler for Processing-in-Memory Offloading Decisions

Processing-in-memory (PIM) architectures reduce the data movement overhead by bringing computation closer to the memory. However, a key challenge is to decide which code regions of a program should be offloaded to PIM for the best performance. The goal of this work is to help programmers leverage PIM architectures by automatically profiling legacy workloads to find PIM-friendly code regions for offloading. We propose PIMProf1, an automated profiling and offloading tool to determine PIM offloading regions for CPU-PIM hybrid architectures. PIMProf efficiently models the comprehensive cost related to PIM offloading and makes the offloading decision by an effective and computational-tractable algorithm. We demonstrate the effectiveness of PIMProf by evaluating the GAP graph benchmark suite and the PARSEC benchmark suite under different PIM and CPU configurations. Our evaluation shows that, compared to the CPU baseline and a PIM-only configuration, the offloading decisions by PIMProf provides 5.33x and 1.39x speedup in the GAP graph workloads, respectively; 2.22x and 1.74x speedup in the PARSEC benchmarks, respectively.