SHF: Medium: Heterogeneous Virtual Machine: Future Execution Environments for Heterogeneous Many-core Architectures

A current industry trend aimed at addressing platform performance/power requirements is to create heterogeneous manycore systems, comprised of general purpose and specialized cores designed to accelerate certain application or system functions. A second trend, designed to make it easier to map a wide variety of functions and components to manycore platforms, is platform-level support for system virtualization. This research innovates, implements, and evaluates new virtualization technologies for heterogeneous manycore architectures composed of commodity general-purpose and accelerator cores. The goal is to realize an efficient execution environment for composing and executing a range of computationally and data-intensive applications. The system abstractions innovated include (i) the HVM (heterogeneous virtual machine) platform abstraction for dynamic composition of resources (e.g., cores, accelerators, memory, I/O) (ii) new methods for managing heterogeneous manycore resources, including power, and (iii) specialized execution environments for optimizing accelerator interactions. These components are implicitly integrated through an execution model wherein the same abstractions and mechanisms are used to dynamically manage diverse accelerator platforms, thereby realizing our vision of freely shared and customized platform resources provided to applications.