GIRAF: General Purpose In-Storage Resistive Associative Framework

Leonid Yavits, Roman Kaplan, Ran Ginosar

2021IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems27 citationsDOI

Abstract

GIRAF is a General purpose In-storage Resistive Associative Framework based on resistive content addressable memory (RCAM), which functions simultaneously as a storage and a massively parallel associative processor. GIRAF alleviates the bandwidth wall by connecting every memory bit to processing transistors and keeping computing inside the storage arrays, thus implementing deep in-data, rather than near-data, processing. We show that GIRAF outperformed a reference computer architecture with a bandwidth-limited external storage access on a variety of data-intensive workloads. The performance of GIRAF Dot Product and Sparse Matrix-Vector multiplication exceeds the attainable performance of a reference architecture by 1200 × and 130 ×, respectively.

Topics & Concepts

Computer scienceMassively parallelComputer data storageContent-addressable memoryAssociative propertyResistive touchscreenBandwidth (computing)Matrix multiplicationParallel computingMultiplication (music)Content-addressable storageComputer hardwareComputer architectureArtificial neural networkArtificial intelligenceOperating systemComputer networkPhysicsQuantumQuantum mechanicsPure mathematicsMathematicsAcousticsAdvanced Memory and Neural ComputingNetwork Packet Processing and OptimizationFerroelectric and Negative Capacitance Devices