HYDRA: A novel framework for making high-performance computing offload capable

The proliferation of programmable peripheral devices for computer systems opens new possibilities for academic research that will influence system designs in the near future. Programmability is a key feature that enables application-specific extensions to improve performance and offer new features. Increasing transistor density and decreasing cost provide excess computational power in devices such as disk controllers, network interfaces and video cards. This paper proposes an innovative programming model and runtime support that enables utilization of such devices by providing a generic code offloading framework. The framework enables an application developer to design the offloading aspects of the application by specifying an "offloading layout", which is enforced by the runtime during application deployment. The framework also provides the necessary development tools and programming constructs for developing such applications. We test our framework by implementing a packet generator on a programmable network card for network testing. The offloaded application produces traffic at five times the rate, and with interpacket variability that is many orders of magnitude smaller than the non-offloaded version.