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Crossing Guard: Mediating Host-Accelerator Coherence Interactions

Authors:

David A. WoodAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News, Volume 45, Issue 1

Pages 163 - 176

https://doi.org/10.1145/3093337.3037715

Published: 04 April 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Specialized hardware accelerators have performance and energy-efficiency advantages over general-purpose processors. To fully realize these benefits and aid programmability, accelerators may share a physical and virtual address space and full cache coherence with the host system. However, allowing accelerators -- particularly those designed by third parties -- to directly communicate with host coherence protocols poses several problems. Host coherence protocols are complex, vary between companies, and may be proprietary, increasing burden on accelerator designers. Bugs in the accelerator implementation may cause crashes and other serious consequences to the host system.

We propose Crossing Guard, a coherence interface between the host coherence system and accelerators. The Crossing Guard interface provides the accelerator designer with a standardized set of coherence messages that are simple enough to aid in design of bug-free coherent caches. At the same time, they are sufficiently complex to allow customized and optimized accelerator caches with performance comparable to using the host protocol. The Crossing Guard hardware is implemented as part of the trusted host, and provides complete safety to the host coherence system, even in the presence of a pathologically buggy accelerator cache.

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Index Terms

Crossing Guard: Mediating Host-Accelerator Coherence Interactions
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Architectures
    1. Other architectures
      1. Heterogeneous (hybrid) systems
2. Hardware
  1. Integrated circuits
    1. Reconfigurable logic and FPGAs
      1. Hardware accelerators
  2. Robustness

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News

ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News Volume 45, Issue 1

Asplos'17

March 2017

812 pages

ISSN:0163-5964

DOI:10.1145/3093337

Editor:
Babak Falsafi
Interim

Issue’s Table of Contents

ASPLOS '17: Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems
April 2017
856 pages
ISBN:9781450344654
DOI:10.1145/3037697
General Chairs:
Yunji Chen
Institute of Computing Technology, CAS, China
,
Olivier Temam
Google, USA
,
Program Chair:
John Carter
IBM, USA

Copyright © 2017 ACM.

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Published: 04 April 2017

Published in SIGARCH Volume 45, Issue 1

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Cited By

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Zhang QWang JKim MSpinellis DGousios GChechik MDi Penta M(2021)HeteroFuzz: fuzz testing to detect platform dependent divergence for heterogeneous applicationsProceedings of the 29th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3468264.3468610(242-254)Online publication date: 20-Aug-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3468264.3468610
Li ANing AWentzlaff D(2023)Duet: Creating Harmony between Processors and Embedded FPGAs2023 IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)10.1109/HPCA56546.2023.10070989(745-758)Online publication date: Feb-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/HPCA56546.2023.10070989
Oswald NNagarajan VSorin DGavrielatos VOlausson TCarr R(2022)HeteroGen: Automatic Synthesis of Heterogeneous Cache Coherence Protocols2022 IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)10.1109/HPCA53966.2022.00061(756-771)Online publication date: Apr-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/HPCA53966.2022.00061
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Ren XLustig DBolotin EJaleel AVilla ONellans D(2020)HMG: Extending Cache Coherence Protocols Across Modern Hierarchical Multi-GPU Systems2020 IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)10.1109/HPCA47549.2020.00054(582-595)Online publication date: Feb-2020
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Alsop JSinclair MAdve S(2018)SpandexProceedings of the 45th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture10.1109/ISCA.2018.00031(261-274)Online publication date: 2-Jun-2018
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Basu AGreathouse JVenkataramani GVesely J(2018)Interference from GPU System Service Requests2018 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization (IISWC)10.1109/IISWC.2018.8573485(179-190)Online publication date: Sep-2018
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