Buddy-RAM: Improving the Performance and Efficiency of Bulk Bitwise Operations Using DRAM

Understand

Bitwise operations are an important component of modern day programming.

• Many widely-used data structures (e.g., bitmap indices in databases) rely on fast bitwise operations on large bit vectors to achieve high performance.
• Unfortunately, in existing systems, regardless of the underlying architecture (e.g., CPU, GPU, FPGA), the throughput of such bulk bitwise operations is limited by the available memory bandwidth.
• We propose Buddy, a new mechanism that exploits the analog operation of DRAM to perform bulk bitwise operations completely inside the DRAM chip.