Extending on-chip interconnects for rack-level remote resource access

Paper in proceeding, 2016

The need to perform data analytics on exploding data volumes coupled with the rapidly changing workloads in cloud computing places great pressure on data-center servers. To improve hardware resource utilization across servers within a rack, we propose Direct Extension of On-chip Interconnects (DEOI), a high-performance and efficient architecture for remote resource access among server nodes. DEOI extends an SoC server node's on-chip interconnect to access resources in adjacent nodes with no protocol changes, allowing remote memory and network resources to be used as if they were local. Our results on a four-node FPGA prototype show that the latency of user-level, cross-node, random reads to DEOI-connected remote memory is as low as 1.16?s, which beats current commercial technologies. We exploit DEOI remote access to improve performance of the Redis in-memory key-value framework by 47%. When using DEOI to access remote network resources, we observe an 8.4% average performance degradation and only a 2.52?s ping-pong latency disparity compared to using local assets. These results suggest that DEOI can be a promising mechanism for increasing both performance and efficiency in next-generation data-center servers.