PIM-CACHE: High-Efficiency Content-Aware Copy for Processing-In-Memory

Abstract: Processing-in-memory (PIM) architectures bring computation closer to data, reducing the processor-memory transfer bottleneck in traditional processor-centric designs. Novel hardware solutions, such as UPMEM's in-memory processing technology, achieve this by integrating low-power DRAM processing units (DPUs) into memory DIMMs, enabling massive parallelism and improved memory bandwidth. However, paradoxically, these PIM architectures introduce mandatory coarse-grained data transfers between host DRAM and DPUs, which often become the new bottleneck. We present PIM-CACHE, a lightweight data staging layer that dynamically eliminates redundant data transfers to PIM DPUs by exploiting workload similarity, achieving content-aware copy (CAC). We evaluate PIM-CACHE on both synthetic workloads and real-world genome datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in reducing PIM data transfer overhead.