Real-time processing of deep learning models on conventional systems, such as CPUs and GPUs, is highly challenging due to memory bottlenecks. This is exacerbated in Large Language Models (LLMs), where the majority of executions are dominated by General Matrix Multiplication (GEMM) operations, which are relatively more memory-intensive than convolution operations. Processing-in-Memory (PIM), which provides high internal bandwidth, can be a promising alternative for LLM serving. However, since current PIM systems do not fully replace traditional memory, data transfer between the host and PIM-side memory is essential. Therefore, minimizing the transfer cost between the host and PIM is crucial for serving LLMs efficiently on the PIM. In this paper, we propose PIM-LLM, an end-to-end framework that accelerates LLMs using an efficient tiled GEMM library and several key target-aware optimizations on real-world PIM systems. We first propose PGEMMlib, which provides optimized tiling techniques for PIM, considering architecture specific characteristics to minimize unnecessary data transfer overhead and maximize parallelism. In addition, Tile-Selector explores optimized parameters and techniques for different GEMM shapes and available resources of PIM systems using an analytical model. To accelerate LLMs using PGEMMlib, we integrate it into the TVM deep learning compiler framework. We further optimize the LLM execution by applying several key optimizations: Build-time memory layout adjustment, PIM resource pooling, CPU/PIM cooperation support, and QKV generation fusion. Evaluation shows that PIM-LLM achieves significant performance gains of up to 45.75x over the TVM baseline for several well-known LLMs. We strongly believe that this work provides key insights for efficient LLM serving on real PIM devices.

Processing-In-Memory (PIM) has recently emerged as a promising solution to alleviate the memory bottleneck by integrating computing capabilities into memory chips. Since PIM provides numerous Processing Elements (PEs) and high-bandwidth on-chip data transfers, full utilization of the PEs becomes a critical mission to maximize the performance of PIM applications. However, due to the diverse and complex characteristics of PIM applications, using more resources does not always improve performance. It is therefore important to find the suitable amount of resources to achieve the best performance and to fully utilize the PIM resources.To address this, we introduce PIM-CARE, a framework for dynamic resource allocation across multiple applications with compiler support on real-world PIM systems. PIM-CARE first determines the best amount of PIM resources to allocate for each application. To enable spatial multitasking, the PIM-CARE daemon monitors resource allocation and deallocation requests and estimates total PIM resource utilization at runtime. It then dynamically schedules applications using a priority-based out-of-order policy, considering both available PIM resources and resource requirements for best performance. Evaluation on real-world PIM systems shows that PIM-CARE improves throughput by 5.49x and average turnaround time by 5.71x compared to the baseline.

Processing-in-Memory (PIM) is a promising architecture for alleviating data movement bottlenecks by performing computations closer to memory.However, PIM workloads often encounter computational bottlenecks within the PIM itself.As these workloads become more compute-intensive by leveraging PIM's high internal bandwidth, a small set of hot code regions emerges as the primary performance bottleneck.Unfortunately, increasing the complexity of the PIM processor is difficult due to inherent memory constraints, such as area and power.Therefore, enhancing the computational capability of PIM while maintaining a lightweight design within limited silicon budgets remains highly challenging.In this paper, we propose PIM-CCA, a novel PIM architecture that integrates a Configurable Compute Accelerator (CCA) to mitigate computational bottlenecks with minimal hardware overhead.The CCA-enabled PIM design allows for the flexible configuration of compute logic, enabling acceleration across diverse workloads.The PIM-CCA compiler constructs an instruction-level dataflow graph to identify hot and compute-bound regions and offload them to the CCA.Furthermore, we analyze the interaction between the PIM threading model and resource utilization to derive the optimal thread count for efficient CCA-enabled PIM usage.We implement PIM-CCA in a cycle-accurate simulator based on a commercially available PIM system, and evaluate it using 14 representative benchmarks.The experimental results show that PIM-CCA achieves up to 1.55× performance improvement over baseline PIM systems, with only 0.036% additional area overhead, based on P&R results with limited metal layers.

Processing-in-Memory (PIM) is an attractive device that can effectively satisfy the rapidly increasing demands for memory-intensive workloads in emerging application domains, such as deep learning and big data processing. Thanks to the integrated design of the main memory (MRAM) and multiple data processing units (DPUs) on a single chip, the PIM devices can provide massive parallelism from numerous DPUs and the substantial bandwidth between the MRAM and DPUs, thus achieving the high performance for the memory-intensive workloads. However, although the recent PIM architectures, including UPMEM, can efficiently execute a single memory-intensive application, they fail to efficiently orchestrate multiple applications on the multiple DPU resources due to the conservative resource allocation, without a resource monitoring system, and large scheduling granularity. To solve these problems, we propose a novel resource-aware dynamic DPU allocation and workload scheduling framework, called Virtual PIM, for multi-DPU PIM architectures such as UPMEM. The framework initially virtualizes the DPU and MRAM to ensure data consistency in multi-application environments. For dynamic DPU allocation, the Virtual PIM framework continuously gathers resource requests from multiple processes and current DPU occupancy information to estimate the dynamic DPU resource status, irrespective of PIM hardware support. Based on this information, the framework dynamically allocates DPUs and schedules workloads in fine-grained levels with minimum occupancy to maximize total DPU utilization. Our evaluations in real PIM environments demonstrate that Virtual PIM significantly improves system throughput and average normalized turnaround time by up to 4.83x and 3.45x, respectively, compared to the SLURM-based baseline.