Device lending in PCI express networks

Abstract

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.