Shared memory heterogeneous computation on PCIe-supported platforms

Abstract

Domain-disparity between CPU and Hardware Accelerators(HA) leads to CPU under-utilization and inter-domain data copy overheads. By exposing HA memory to OS and host MMU, these overheads can be eliminated. In this paper, we present a shared virtual memory real system design for PCIe-based HAs to enable parallel heterogeneous execution in CPU and HAs without driver overheads. We extend Linux with a custom memory manager and scheduler to manage HA memory and application-cores respectively. Our FPGA-based multi-application logic design supports simultaneous execution of multiple heterogeneous applications. We show the advantages of heterogeneous execution and analyze how our design reduces OS overhead.