In-DRAM Bulk Bitwise Execution Engine

TL;DR

This paper introduces Ambit, a novel DRAM-based mechanism that performs bulk bitwise operations inside memory, significantly reducing data transfer overhead and improving performance for applications like databases.

Contribution

Ambit is the first to exploit DRAM internal organization for in-memory bulk bitwise operations, achieving low cost, high performance, and energy efficiency.

Findings

Significant performance improvements in bitwise-heavy applications

Reduced memory bandwidth and energy consumption

Effective in database and data processing workloads

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.