Evaluating Machine Learning Workloads on Memory-Centric Computing Systems

Training machine learning (ML) algorithms is a computationally intensive process, which is frequently memory-bound due to repeatedly accessing large training datasets. As a result, processor-centric systems (CPU, GPU) waste large amounts of energy and execution cycles due to the data movement between memory units and processing units. Memory-centric computing systems, i.e., systems with processing-in-memory (PIM) capabilities, can alleviate this data movement bottleneck. Our goal is to understand the potential of general-purpose PIM architectures to accelerate ML training. To do so, we (1) implement several classic ML algorithms (namely, linear regression, logistic regression, decision tree, K-Means clustering) on a real-world general-purpose PIM architecture, (2) evaluate and characterize them in terms of accuracy, performance and scaling, and (3) compare to their counterpart state-of-the-art implementations on CPU and GPU. Our evaluation on a real memory-centric computing system with more than 2500 PIM cores shows that PIM greatly accelerates memory-bound ML workloads, when the necessary operations and datatypes are natively supported by PIM hardware. For example, our PIM implementation of decision tree is 27x faster than the CPU implementation on an 8-core Intel Xeon, and 1.34x faster than the GPU implementation on an NVIDIA A100. Our PIM implementation of K-Means clustering is 2.8x and 3.2x faster than CPU and GPU implementations, respectively. We provide several key observations, takeaways, and recommendations for users of ML workloads, programmers of PIM architectures, and hardware designers and architects of future memory-centric computing systems. We open-source all our code and datasets at https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/pim- ml.