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Onur Mutlu

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Open access Aug 2026

GUMPIM: Unitary and Malleable Memory for Processing-in-Memory with Guaranteed PIM Pages

DRAM-based Processing-in-Memory (PIM) addresses the “memory wall” by executing computations directly inside main memory. However, memory interleaving and virtual memory limit contiguous data size visible to PIM units, constraining PIM task granularity. Fine-grained PIM tasks incur significant offloading overhead that negates PIM performance benefits. To mitigate this, existing PIM systems drastically isolate PIM memory or disable memory interleaving. These design choices, however, decrease the CPU memory bandwidth and introduce extra data transfer, leading to an additional “system memory wall” that degrades CPU performance and must be resolved to realize PIM’s full potential. In this work, we propose GUMPIM, a PIM system that allows interleaved CPU pages and non-interleaved PIM pages to coexist in a Unitary and Malleable memory space with Guaranteed PIM page allocation. GUMPIM enables zero-copy during PIM task offloading and maintains CPU memory bandwidth while ensuring low PIM offloading overhead. First, we propose a dual-track memory management mechanism consisting of independent page allocation and address translation for CPU and PIM pages. Second, we design GUMPIM interface hardware on PIM-enabled DRAMs to provide a dynamic address mapping for the different data layouts of CPU and PIM pages. Third, we propose a PIM-assisted page migration mechanism that transparently migrates pages while preserving CPU access bandwidth, thereby enabling guaranteed and accelerated PIM page allocation. GUMPIM requires no changes to commodity DRAM standards; all hardware modifications are limited to the DRAM side, ensuring full compatibility with existing CPUs and enabling immediate deployment on current HBMx- and LPDDRx-based PIM platforms. Our results show only <0.1% performance degradation for CPU workloads on GUMPIM, in contrast to the 25.8% degradation on PIM systems with memory interleaving turned off. For PIM workloads, GUMPIM reduces memory allocation and CPU-part computation times by 2.7× and 4.93×, respectively, yielding an end-to-end 2.3× speedup over a state-of-the-art baseline system.

Yilong Zhao, Fangxin Liu, Yiwei Hu et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Jul 2026

Valinor: Architectural Support for Fast, Energy-Efficient and Programmable Physical Memory Allocation

Physical memory allocation establishes virtual-to-physical mappings on demand. In current systems, each minor page fault traps into the kernel and triggers pipeline flushes, stalls, and a long sequence of allocation steps that can cost tens of thousands of cycles. These overheads are increasingly significant for short-lived workloads such as serverless functions and microservices, where minor faults can account for up to 54% of runtime and up to 40% of system energy. Prior hardware allocation proposals avoid traps and context switches, but either sacrifice useful placement optimizations or rely on fixed-function logic that cannot adapt to new policies or changing hardware conditions. We present Valinor, a hardware-OS cooperative memory allocation substrate that combines software flexibility with hardware-class performance. Valinor introduces a programmable hardware allocation engine that executes compact OS-supplied allocation libraries at close to fixed-hardware speed. It supports diverse policies, including short-lived object allocators, integrity mechanisms, and hardware-telemetry-guided placement. We implement Valinor on a BOOM RISC-V soft core running Linux and in a full-system simulator. On real hardware, Valinor accelerates allocation by 17x, improves end-to-end performance by 16%, and reduces energy consumption by up to 8%. Full-system simulation further evaluates the programmable allocation engine and six allocation libraries, showing that Valinor provides hardware-class performance without sacrificing programmability.

Konstantinos Kanellopoulos, Spiros Galanopoulos, Konstantinos Sgouras et al. · 0 citations