Tapping into the fountain of CPUs: On operating system support for programmable devices

The constant race for faster and more powerful CPUs is drawing to a close. No longer is it feasible to significantly increase the speed of the CPU without paying a crushing penalty in power consumption and production costs. Instead of increasing single thread perfor-mance, the industry is turning to multiple CPU threads or cores (such as SMT and CMP) and heterogeneous CPU architectures (such as the Cell Broadband Engine). While this is a step in the right direction, in every modern PC there is a wealth of untapped compute resources. The NIC has a CPU; the disk controller is programmable; some high-end graphics adapters are already more powerful than host CPUs. Some of these CPUs can perform some functions more efficiently than the host CPUs. Our operating sys-tems and programming abstractions should be expanded to let ap-plications tap into these computational resources and make the best use of them. Therefore, we propose the HYDRA framework, which lets ap-plication developers use the combined power of every compute re-source in a coherent way. HYDRA is a programming model and a runtime support layer which enables utilization of host processors as well as various programmable peripheral devices ’ processors. We present the framework and its application for a demonstrative use-case, as well as provide a thorough evaluation of its capabili-ties. Using HYDRA we were able to cut down the development cost of a system that uses multiple heterogenous compute resources sig-nificantly