Deep Neural Network Memory Performance and Throughput Modeling and Simulation Framework

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are widely used in various artificial intelligence applications and platforms, such as sensors in internet of things (IoT) devices, speech and image recognition in mobile systems, and web searching in data centers. While DNNs achieve remarkable prediction accuracy, they introduce major computational and memory bandwidth challenges due to the increasing model complexity and the growing amount of data used for training and inference. These challenges introduce major difficulties not only due to the constraints of system cost, performance, and energy consumption, but also due to limitations in currently available memory bandwidth. The recent advances in semiconductor technologies have further intensified the gap between computational hardware performance and memory systems bandwidth. Consequently, memory systems are, today, a major performance bottleneck for DNN applications. In this paper, we present DRAMA, a deep neural network memory simulator. DRAMA extends the SCALE-Sim simulator for DNN inference on systolic arrays with a detailed, accurate, and extensive modeling and simulation environment of the memory system. DRAMA can simulate in detail the hierarchical main memory components—such as memory channels, modules, ranks, and banks—and related timing parameters. In addition, DRAMA can explore tradeoffs for memory system performance and identify bottlenecks for different DNNs and memory architectures. We demonstrate DRAMA’s capabilities through a set of experimental simulations based on several use cases.