Co-ML: a case for Co llaborative ML acceleration using near-data processing

The growing importance of Machine Learning (ML) has led to a proliferation of accelerator designs that target ML workloads. The majority of these designs focus on accelerating compute-intensive regions of ML workloads such as general matrix multiplications (GEMMs) and convolutions. While this is a legitimate approach, we observe in this work that ML workloads also comprise data-intensive computations that manifest low compute-to-byte ratios and can often contribute considerably to the total execution time. Further, we also observe that, the presence of such computations opens up an exciting opportunity for near-data processing (NDP) architectures as they often provision for higher memory bandwidth that can benefit such computations.