Flips: A Flexible Partitioning Strategy Near Memory Processing Architecture for Recommendation System

Personalized recommendation systems are massively deployed in production data centers. The memory-intensive embedding layers of recommendation systems are the crucial performance bottleneck, with operations manifesting as sparse memory lookups and simple reduction computations. Recent studies propose near-memory processing (NMP) architectures to speed up embedding operations by utilizing high internal memory bandwidth. However, these solutions typically employ a fixed vector partitioning strategy that fail to adapt to changes in data center deployment scenarios and lack practicality. We propose Flips, a flexible partitioning strategy NMP architecture that accelerates embedding layers. Flips supports more than ten partitioning strategies through hardware-software co-design. Novel hardware architectures and address mapping schemes are designed for the memory-side and host-side. We provide two approaches to determine the optimal partitioning strategy for each embedding table, enabling the architecture to accommodate changes in deployment scenarios. Importantly, Flips is decoupled from the NMP level and can utilize rank-level, bank-group-level and bank-level parallelism. In peer-level NMP evaluations, Flips outperforms state-of-the-art NMP solutions, RecNMP, TRiM, and ReCross by up to 4.0x, 4.1x, and 3.5x, respectively.