Active Forwarding: Eliminate IOMMU Address Translation for Accelerator-rich Architectures

Abstract

Accelerator-rich architectures employ IOMMUs to support unified virtual address, but researches show that they fail to meet the performance and energy requirements of accelerators. Instead of optimizing the speed/energy of IOMMU address translation, this work tackles the issue from a new perspective, eliminating the need for translation with an active forwarding (AF) mechanism that forwards input data of accelerators directly from the CPU cache to the scratchpad memory of the accelerator. Results show that on average, AF can provide 8% performance improvement compared to the state-of-the-art mechanism, hostPageWalk, and reduce 22.1% accelerator power.