1. A near-memory acceleration method for offloading data traversal operations from a processing element at a near-memory accelerator configured to interact with each of the processing element and a memory used by the processing element, the method comprising: performing the data traversal operations to chase pointers, in order to identify a pointer to data to be processed by the processing element, wherein, the data traversal operations are performed based on indications from the processing element; and data needed to perform the data traversal operations are fetched by the near-memory accelerator, from the memory.