Wave-PIM: Accelerating Wave Simulation Using Processing-in-Memory

Abstract

Wave simulations are used in many applications: medical imaging, oil and gas exploration, earthquake hazard mitigation, and defense systems, among others. Most of these applications require repeated solutions of the wave equation on supercomputers. Minimizing time to solution and energy consumption are very beneficial in this domain. Data movement overhead is one of the key bottlenecks that affect energy consumption. Processing-in-Memory (PIM) has been a popular choice for deploying data-intensive applications, as a result of its high parallelism, low off-chip data movement and low energy consumption. In this paper, we propose an ISA-based, digital PIM system, to accelerate wave simulations. We fully explore the parallelism inside the algorithm, based on the size of the model and the availability of the PIM resources. We also examine the interconnections to optimize the inter-block data transfer. Our Wave-PIM can achieve an average of 41.98 × speedup, as well as 12.66 × energy savings, compared to the three state-of-the-art GPU platforms.