  Processing-in-memory (PIM) promises to alleviate the data movement bottleneck
in modern computing systems. However, current real-world PIM systems have the
inherent disadvantage that their hardware is more constrained than in
conventional processors (CPU, GPU), due to the difficulty and cost of building
processing elements near or inside the memory. As a result, general-purpose PIM
architectures support fairly limited instruction sets and struggle to execute
complex operations such as transcendental functions and other hard-to-calculate
operations (e.g., square root). These operations are particularly important for
some modern workloads, e.g., activation functions in machine learning
applications.
  In order to provide support for transcendental (and other hard-to-calculate)
functions in general-purpose PIM systems, we present \emph{TransPimLib}, a
library that provides CORDIC-based and LUT-based methods for trigonometric
functions, hyperbolic functions, exponentiation, logarithm, square root, etc.
We develop an implementation of TransPimLib for the UPMEM PIM architecture and
perform a thorough evaluation of TransPimLib's methods in terms of performance
and accuracy, using microbenchmarks and three full workloads (Blackscholes,
Sigmoid, Softmax). We open-source all our code and datasets
at~\url{https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/transpimlib}.
