Towards Scalable I/O on a Many-core Architecture

Michael A. Hicks,  Michiel W. van Tol,  Chris R. Jesshope
University of Amsterdam


Abstract

Abtract

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The limitations of conventional processor performance scaling mean that general purpose many-core processors are increasingly becoming a reality. Conventional hardware device I/O, interrupt handling and operating system stacks scale poorly and are inefficient when compared with the parallelism that these architectures provide. Many-core I/O requires a decentralised approach where not every core is directly connected to the I/O infrastructure. As such, this paper discusses a software and hardware model designed to take full advantage of I/O parallelism in the SVP concurrency model and the Microgrid many-core architecture.

The generic software I/O stack presented describes a high-level method by which clients and I/O resources can communicate and synchronise in a parallel and decentralised environment. The associated hardware implementation provides a facility to the higher-level interface through the introduction of specialised \emph{I/O Cores} which provide high-speed communication between external devices directly and the on-chip memory system.