Multi armed bandit based resource allocation in Near Memory Processing architectures

Abstract

Recent advances in 3D fabrication have allowed handling the memory bottlenecks for modern data-intensive applications by bringing the computation closer to the memory, enabling Near Memory Processing (NMP). Memory Centric Networks (MCN) are advanced memory architectures that use NMP architectures, where multiple stacks of the 3D memory units are equipped with simple processing cores, allowing numerous threads to execute concurrently. The performance of the NMP is crucially dependent upon the efficient task offloading and task-to-NMP allocation. Our work presents a multi-armed bandit (MAB) based approach in formulating an efficient resource allocation strategy for MCN. Most existing literature concentrates only on one application domain and optimizing only one metric, i.e., either execution time or power. However, our solution is more generic and can be applied to diverse application domains. In our approach, we deploy Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) policy to collect rewards and eventually use it for regret optimization. We study the following metrics-instructions per cycle, execution times, NMP core cache misses, packet latencies, and power consumption. Our study covers various applications from PARSEC and SPLASH2 benchmarks suite. The evaluation shows that the system’s performance improves by $\sim 11\text{\%}$ on average and an average reduction in total power consumption by $\sim 12\text{\%}$.