A Review of Near-Memory Computing Architectures: Opportunities and Challenges <s> Microarchitecture-Dependent Workload Characterization <s> Specialized architectures will become increasingly important as the computing industry demands more energy-efficient designs. The application-centric design style for these architectures is heavily dependent on workload characterization of intrinsic program characteristics, but at the same time these architectures are likely to be decoupled from legacy ISAs. In this work, we perform ISA-independent workload characterization for a variety of important intrinsic program characteristics relating to computation, memory, and control flow. The analysis is performed using a JIT compiler that emits ISA-independent instructions. We compare this analysis with an x86 trace and find that several of the analyses are highly sensitive to the ISA. We conclude that designers of specialized architectures must adopt ISA-independent workload characterization approaches. <s> BIB001 </s> A Review of Near-Memory Computing Architectures: Opportunities and Challenges <s> Microarchitecture-Dependent Workload Characterization <s> While cluster computing frameworks are continuously evolving to provide real-time data analysis capabilities, Apache Spark has managed to be at the forefront of big data analytics for being a unified framework for both, batch and stream data processing. There is also a renewed interest in Near Data Processing (NDP) due to technological advancement in the last decade. However, it is not known if NDP architectures can improve the performance of big data processing frameworks such as Apache Spark. In this paper, we build the case of NDP architecture comprising programmable logic based hybrid 2D integrated processing-in-memory and in-storage processing for Apache Spark, by extensive profiling of Apache Spark based workloads on Ivy Bridge Server. <s> BIB002
Traditionally workload characterization is done using hardware performance counters present on our current microprocessors. Awan et al. BIB002 use hardware performance counters to characterize the scale-out big data processing workloads into CPU-bound, memory-bound, and I/O-bound applications and propose programmable logic near DRAM and NVRAM. However, the use of hardware performance counters is limited by the impact of micro-architecture features like cache size, issue width etc BIB001 . To overcome this problem, recently there has been a strong push towards following a ISA independent characterization approach.