Sim2PIM: A Fast Method for Simulating Host Independent & PIM Agnostic Designs
Paulo C. Santosa, Bruno E. Forlinb and Luigi Carroc
Informatics Institute – Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul – Porto Alegre, Brazil
apcssjunior@inf.ufrgs.br
bbeforlin@inf.ufrgs.br
ccarro@inf.ufrgs.br
ABSTRACT
Processing-in-Memory (PIM), with the help of modern memory integration technologies, has emerged as a practical approach to mitigate the memory wall and improve performance and energy efficiency in contemporary applications. However, there is a need for tools capable of quickly simulating different PIMs designs and their suitable integration with different hosts. This work presents Sim2PIM, a Simple Simulator for PIM devices that seamlessly integrates any PIM architecture with the host processor and memory hierarchy. Sim2PIM’s simulation environment allows the user to describe a PIM architecture in different userdefined abstraction levels. The application code runs natively on the Host, with minimal overhead from the simulator integration, allowing Sim2PIM to collect precise metrics from the Hardware Performance Counters (HPCs). Our simulator is available to download at https://pim.computer/.
Keywords: Processing-in-Memory, Simulator, Performance, Cycle Accurate.
