Cellule: Lightweight Execution Environment for Accelerator-based Systems
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Abstract
The increasing prevalence of accelerators is changing the high performance
computing (HPC) landscape to one in which future platforms
will consist of heterogeneous multi-core chips comprised of
both general purpose and specialized cores. Coupled with this trend
is increased support for virtualization, which can abstract underlying
hardware to aid in dynamically managing its use by HPC applications
while at the same time, provide lightweight, efficient, and
specialized execution environments (SEE) for applications to maximally
exploit the hardware. This paper describes the Cellule architecture which uses virtualization
to create high performance, low noise SEEs for accelerators.
The paper describes important properties of Cellule and illustrates
its advantages with an implementation on the IBM Cell processor.
With compute-intensive workloads, performance improvements of
up to 60% are attained when using Cellule’s SEE vs. the current
Linux-based runtime, resulting in a system architecture that
is suitable for future accelerators and specialized cores irrespective
of whether they are on-chip or off-chip. A key principle, coordinated
resource management for accelerator and general purpose resources,
is shown to extend beyond Cell, using experimental results
obtained on a different accelerator platform.
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Date
2010
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Text
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Technical Report