Tapping into the fountain of CPUs: On operating system support for programmable devices

Yaron Weinsberg*, Danny Dolev, Tal Anker, Muli Ben-Yehuda, Pete Wyckoff

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

23 Scopus citations

Abstract

The constant race for faster and more powerful CPUs is drawing to a close. No longer is it feasible to significantly increase the speed of the CPU without paying a crushing penalty in power consumption and production costs. Instead of increasing single thread performance, the industry is turning to multiple CPU threads or cores (such as SMT and CMP) and heterogeneous CPU architectures (such as the Cell Broadband Engine). While this is a step in the right direction, in every modern PC there is a wealth of untapped compute resources. The NIC has a CPU; the disk controller is programmable; some high-end graphics adaptersare already more powerful than host CPUs. Some of these CPUs can perform some functions more efficiently than the host CPUs. Our operating systems and programming abstractions should be expanded to let applications tap into these computational resources and make the best use of them. Therefore, we propose the HYDRA framework, which lets application developers use the combined power of every compute resource in a coherent way. HYDRA is a programming model and a runtime support layer which enables utilization of host processors as well as various programmable peripheral devices' processors. We present the frameworkand its application for a demonstrative use-case, as well as provide a thorough evaluation of its capabilities. Using HYDRA we were able to cut down the development cost of a system that uses multiple heterogenous compute resources significantly.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationASPLOS XIII - Thirteenth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems
Pages179-188
Number of pages10
Edition2
DOIs
StatePublished - 2008

Publication series

NameOperating Systems Review (ACM)
Number2
Volume42
ISSN (Print)0163-5980

Keywords

  • Offloading
  • Operating systems
  • Programming model

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