ReD-LUT: Reconfigurable In-DRAM LUTs Enabling Massive Parallel Computation

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a reconfigurable processing-in-DRAM architecture named ReD-LUT leveraging the high density of commodity main memory to enable a flexible, general-purpose, and massively parallel computation. ReD-LUT supports lookup table (LUT) queries to efficiently execute complex arithmetic operations (e.g., multiplication, division, etc.) via only memory read operation. In addition, ReD-LUT enables bulk bit-wise in-memory logic by elevating the analog operation of the DRAM sub-array to implement Boolean functions between operands stored in the same bit-line beyond the scope of prior DRAM-based proposals. We explore the efficacy of ReD-LUT in two computationally-intensive applications, i.e., low-precision deep learning acceleration, and the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) computation. Our circuit-to-architecture simulation results show that for a quantized deep learning workload, ReD-LUT reduces the energy consumption per image by a factor of 21.4× compared with the GPU and achieves ~37.8× speedup and 2.1× energy-efficiency over the best in-DRAM bit-wise accelerators. As for AES data-encryption, it reduces energy consumption by a factor of ~2.2× compared to an ASIC implementation.