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SNIC-DSM: SmartNIC based DSM Infrastructure for Heterogeneous-ISA Machines

Heterogeneous computing is increasingly used in today's datacenters to meet the increasing computational demands of applications. Heterogeneous hardware typically includes CPUs, GPUs, ASICs, and FPGAs, among others. An important emerging trend is instructionset- architecture (ISA)-heterogeneity: high-end x86 servers with attached SmartNICs and SmartSSDs that incorporate general-purpose CPUs, typically of the RISC ISA family (e.g., ARM, RISC-V). To alleviate resource congestion on server computing nodes, application workloads can be scaled-out across server x86 CPUs and SmartNIC ARM CPUs using the distributed shared memory (DSM) abstraction. We present SNIC-DSM, a SmartNIC-based DSM infrastructure for heterogeneous ISA machines. SNIC-DSM implements a low-latency messaging layer, which enables inter-node communication across multi-ISA CPUs, and a DSM protocol processor that provides memory coherency among these nodes, both implemented in SmartNIC's FPGA logic. SNIC-DSM is reconfigurable and allows the implementation of different memory consistency protocols. Our experimental studies using compute-intensive benchmarks reveal that SNIC-DSM outperforms the state-of-the-art DSM - Popcorn Linux's software DSM - when server resource congestion is high. / Master of Science / The availability of heterogeneous computing architectures has led to the development of distributed shared memory systems, which allows compute-intensive applications to run in a distributed manner on different types of computing devices such as graphics processors, reconfigurable logic devices, and custom integrated circuits. Adopting such a heterogeneous computing strategy yields better performance and improves power consumption. Generally, these DSM systems use a software-based approach, which offers great flexibility but suffers from software overheads. Hardware-based approaches are used to overcome these limitations but they generally do not offer flexibility. This thesis presents, SNIC-DSM, which is a reconfigurable implementation of the DSM framework. SNIC-DSM provides a platform for the host and smart networking devices such as SmartNICs to communicate with each other and enables application execution in a distributed manner by providing memory coherency.
Our experimental evaluation using High-Performance Computing benchmarks reveals that SNIC-DSM improves performance when compared with software-based DSM.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/116037
Date14 August 2023
CreatorsRamesh, Hemanth
ContributorsElectrical and Computer Engineering, Ravindran, Binoy, Lemos Horta, Edson, Patterson, Cameron D.
PublisherVirginia Tech
Source SetsVirginia Tech Theses and Dissertation
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis
FormatETD, application/pdf
RightsIn Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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