COMPASS TALK by Leonid Yavits (Technion): Resistive CAM based architectures: Resistive Associative In-Storage Processor and Resistive Address Decoder

COMPASS: Computing Platforms Seminar Series

CAB E 72

Wednesday, 15 August 2018, 11:00-12:00 in CAB E 72

Speaker: Leonid Yavits (Technion - Israel Institute of Technology)

Title: Resistive CAM based architectures: Resistive Associative In-Storage Processor and Resistive Address Decoder

Abstract:

I will present two Resistive CAM (RCAM) based architectures:

Typical processing in storage architecture places processing cores inside storage system and allows near-data processing. A RCAM based Resistive Associative In-Storage Processor functions simultaneously as a storage and a massively parallel SIMD accelerator. It confines the computing to the storage arrays, thus implementing in-data rather than near-data processing. Resistive Associative In-Storage Processor outperforms the fastest state of art accelerators, achieving speedup of 9.7x, 5.1x, 3.5x and 2.9x for k-means, k-nearest neighbors, Smith-Waterman sequence alignment and fully connected layer of DNN, respectively.

Address decoders are typically hardwired. Replacing wires by resistive elements allows storing address alongside data and comparing it to input address, thus transforming address decoder into CAM and enabling fully associative access. Applications of resistive address decoder include fully associative TLB, cache and virtually addressable memory.

Bio: 

Leonid Yavits received his MSc and PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Technion. After graduating, he co-founded VisionTech where he co-designed the world's first single chip MPEG2 codec. Following VisionTech’s acquisition by Broadcom, he managed Broadcom Israel R&D and co-developed a number of video compression products. Later Leonid co-founded Horizon Semiconductors where he co-designed a Set Top Box-on-chip for cable and satellite TV. Horizon's chip was among world's earliest heterogeneous MPSoC.

Leonid is a postdoc fellow in Electrical Engineering in the Technion. He co-authored a number of patents and research papers. His research interests include non von Neumann computer architectures; processing in memory and resistive memory based computing; architectures for computational biology and bioinformatics tasks. Leonid's research work has earned several awards; among them: IEEE Computer Architecture Letter journal Best Paper Awards for 2015 and 2017.