Asymmetric flow control for data transfer in hybrid computing systems
by F. Iorio,
K. Müller,
A. Castelfranco,
O. Callanan,
and T. Sanuki
Hybrid computing systems that combine specialized accelerators
with general-purpose processors are now being used to improve
performance in many application areas. However, processing of
network communications by the accelerators is often a significant
bottleneck to the performance of the hybrid system. At the same time,
the powerful yet underutilized general-purpose processors of the
hybrid system are well suited to processing significant levels of
network traffic. In this paper, we propose a novel asymmetric
network data flow control system optimized for data stream
processing. The system allows the general-purpose processors in a
hybrid system to take complete control of network data movement.
The system uses remote direct memory access to allow direct
communication between the general-purpose processors and the
main memories of the accelerators, with no network processing
overhead on the accelerators. The accelerators only perform read
and write operations with respect to the main memory. Our Cell
Broadband Engine® implementation of the system returns a high
throughput of up to 934 MB/s, directly communicating with multiple
processor cores with full data flow control to multiple processor
cores, while eliminating the network processing bottleneck on the
accelerator system. Furthermore, our implementation demonstrates
excellent performance scalability when targeting increasing numbers
of processor cores on the accelerator system.
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