Scalable Coherent Interface

Alnaes, K.; Kristiansen, Ernst; Gustavson, D.B.; James, D.V.

doi:10.1109/cmpeur.1990.113656

Cited by 19 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…The idea of a unified network for the inner components of a computer with those of another is not new. It was already imagined for both ATM [12] and SCI [13]. However, these ideas never got implemented, because none of these technologies were picked up for internal I/O interconnection networks.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flexible device compositions and dynamic resource sharing in PCIe interconnected clusters using Device Lending

et al. 2019

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Modern workloads often exceed the processing and I/O capabilities provided by resource virtualization, requiring direct access to the physical hardware in order to reduce latency and computing overhead. For computers interconnected in a cluser, access to remote hardware resources often requires facilitation both in hardware and specialized drivers with virtualization support. This limits the availability of resources to specific devices and drivers that are supported by the virtualization technology being used, as well as what the interconnection technology supports. For PCI Express (PCIe) clusters, we have previously proposed Device Lending as a solution for enabling direct low latency access to remote devices. The method has extremely low computing overhead, and does not require any application- or device-specific distribution mechanisms. Any PCIe device, such as network cards disks, and GPUs, can easily be shared among the connected hosts. In this work, we have extended our solution with support for a virtual machine (VM) hypervisor. Physical remote devices can be “passed through” to VM guests, enabling direct access to physical resources while still retaining the flexibility of virtualization. Additionally, we have also implemented multi-device support, enabling shortest-path peer-to-peer transfers between remote devices residing in different hosts.Our experimental results prove that multiple remote devices can be used, achieving bandwidth and latency close to native PCIe, and without requiring any additional support in device drivers. I/O intensive workloads run seamlessly using both local and remote resources. With our added VM and multi-device support, Device Lending offers highly customizable configurations of remote devices that can be dynamically reassigned and shared to optimize resource utilization, thus enabling a flexible composable I/O infrastructure for VMs as well as bare-metal machines.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flexible device compositions and dynamic resource sharing in PCIe interconnected clusters using Device Lending

et al. 2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…The idea of a unified network for the inner components of a computer with those of another is not new. It was already imagined for both ATM [26] and SCI [4]. These ideas never got implemented, because none of these technologies were picked up for internal IO interconnection networks.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flexible Device Sharing in PCIe Clusters using Device Lending

Markussen

Kristiansen

Stensland

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 47th International Conference on Parallel Processing Companion

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Processing workloads may have very high IO demands, exceeding the capabilities provided by resource virtualization and requiring direct access to the physical hardware. For computers that are interconnected in PCI Express (PCIe) networks, we have previously proposed Device Lending as a solution for assigning devices to remote hosts. In this paper, we explain how we have extended our implementation with support for the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor. Using our extended Device Lending, it becomes possible to dynamically "pass through" physical remote devices to VM guests while still retaining the flexibility of virtualization, something that previously required extensive facilitation in both hypervisor and device drivers in the form of paravirtualization. We have also improved our original implementation with support for interoperability between remote devices. We show that it is possible to use multiple devices residing in different hosts, while still achieving the same bandwidth and latency as native PCIe, and without requiring any additional support in device drivers. CCS CONCEPTS • Computer systems organization → Distributed architectures; Interconnection architectures; Cloud computing;

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“…The idea of a unified bus for the inner components of a computer with those of another is not new. It was imagined for both ATM [24] and SCI [1]. These ideas never got implemented, because none of these technologies were picked up for the internal interconnection networks of computers.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Device lending in PCI express networks

Kristiansen

Markussen

Stensland

et al. 2016

Proceedings of the 26th International Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video

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The challenge of scaling IO performance of multimedia systems to demands of their users has attracted much research. A lot of effort has gone into development of distributed systems that add little latency and computing overhead. For machines in PCI Express (PCIe) clusters, we propose Device Lending as a novel solution which works at a system level. Device Lending achieves low latency and extremely low computing overhead without requiring any application-specific distribution mechanisms. For applications, the remote IO resource appears local. In fact, even the drivers of the operating system remain unaware that hardware resources are located in remote machines. By enabling machines in a PCIe cluster to lend a wide variety of hardware, cluster machines can get temporary access to a pool of IO resources. Network cards, FPGAs, SSDs, and even GPUs can easily be shared among computers. Our proposed solution, Device Lending, works transparently without requiring any modifications to drivers, operating systems or software applications. CCS Concepts •Computer systems organization → Distributed architectures; •Software and its engineering → Distributed systems organizing principles;

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Scalable Coherent Interface

Cited by 19 publications

References 4 publications

Flexible device compositions and dynamic resource sharing in PCIe interconnected clusters using Device Lending

Flexible device compositions and dynamic resource sharing in PCIe interconnected clusters using Device Lending

Flexible Device Sharing in PCIe Clusters using Device Lending

Device lending in PCI express networks

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