PIM-malloc: A Fast and Scalable Dynamic Memory Allocator for Processing-In-Memory (PIM) Architectures

Abstract: Dynamic memory allocation is essential in modern programming but remains under-supported in current PIM devices. In this work, we first conduct a design space exploration of PIM memory allocators, examining optimal metadata placement and management strategies. Building on these insights, we propose PIM-malloc, a fast and scalable allocator for real PIM hardware, improving allocation performance by $66\times$. We further enhance this design with a lightweight, per-PIM core hardware cache for dynamic allocation, achieving an additional $31\%$ performance gain. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of PIM-malloc using a dynamic graph update workload, achieving a $28\times$ throughput increase.