PIMSim: A Flexible and Detailed Processing-in-Memory Simulator

With the advent of big data applications and new process technologies, Process-in-Memory (PIM) attracts much attention in memory research as the architecture studies gradually shift from processors to heterogeneous aspects. How to achieve reliable and efficient PIM architecture modeling becomes increasingly urgent for the researchers, who want to experiment on critical issues from detailed implementations of their proposed PIM designs. This paper proposes PIMSim, a full-system and highly-configurable PIM simulator to facilitate circuit-, architecture- and system-level researches. PIMSim enables architectural simulation of PIM and implements three simulation modes to provide a wide range of speed/accuracy tradeoffs. It offers detailed performance and energy models to simulate PIM-enabled instructions, compiler, in-memory processing logic, various memory devices, and PIM coherence. PIMSim is open source and available at https://github.com/vineodd/PIMSim.