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, wherein performing the traversal operations comprises: identifying said pointer to data to be processed by the processing element upon completion of the data traversal operations performed wherein the data traversal operations are performed iteratively until no new current pointer can be selected, in which case a last identified candidate pointer is returned to the processing element; and returning to the processing element said last identified candidate pointer or said data to be processed by the processing element, and wherein the near-memory accelerator is located in the memory used by the processing element.