부산대학교 도서관

With the recent advances in AI (artificial intelligence) and HPC (high-performance computing) technologies, deep learning is proliferated in various domains of the 4th industrial revolution. As the workload volume of deep learning increasingly grows, analyzing the memory reference characteristics becomes important. In this article, we analyze the memory reference traces of deep learning workloads in comparison with traditional workloads specially focusing on read and write operations. Based on our analysis, we observe some unique characteristics of deep learning memory references that are quite different from traditional workloads. First, when comparing instruction and data references, instruction reference accounts for a little portion in deep learning workloads. Second, when comparing read and write, write reference accounts for a majority of memory references, which is also different from traditional workloads. Third, although write references are dominant, it exhibits low reference skewness compared to traditional workloads. Specifically, the skew factor of write references is small compared to traditional workloads. We expect that the analysis performed in this article will be helpful in efficiently designing memory management systems for deep learning workloads.