GePSeA: A General-Purpose Software Acceleration Framework for Lightweight Task Offloading

Abstract

Hardware-acceleration techniques continue to be used to speed-up the execution of scientific codes. To do so, software developers identify portions of these codes that are amenable for offloading and map them to hardware accelerators. However, offloading such tasks to specialized hardware accelerators is non-trivial. Furthermore, these accelerators can add significant cost to a computing system. Consequently, we propose a framework called GePSeA (General Purpose Software Acceleration Framework), which uses a small fraction of the computational power on multi-core architectures to ``onload'' complex application-specific tasks. Specifically, GePSeA provides a lightweight process that acts as a helper agent to the application by executing application-specific tasks asynchronously and efficiently. We then apply the GePSeA framework to a real application, namely, an open-source computational biology application, and demonstrate significant application-level benefits.