About
There is a dearth of interfaces for efficient attachment of new kinds of non-volatile memory and purpose-built compute accelerators to processor pipelines. Early integrated microprocessors exposed an off-chip front-side bus to which discrete memory and peripheral controllers could attach in a standardized fashion. With the advent of symmetric multiprocessing and deep caches, this direct connection, together with memory controllers, has been implemented primarily using proprietary on-die technology. Proprietary interconnects and protocols hinder architectural innovation and are at odds with the open nature of the rapidly growing RISC-V movement.
In this talk I will describe Western Digital's efforts to rekindle architectural innovation by popularizing OmniXtend, a fully open coherence protocol meant to restore unrestricted interoperability of heterogeneous compute engines with a wide variety of memory and storage technologies. OmniXtend supports a four-hop MESI protocol and is designed to take advantage of a new wave of Ethernet switches with stateful and programmable data planes to facilitate system scalability. Ethernet transport was selected as a starting point for its ubiquity and historic resilience to reduce barriers to entry at modern bandwidths and latencies. Moreover, it allows us to build upon a vibrant ecosystem of hardware and IP, and to provide a boost to architectural innovation through the use of field-reconfigurable networking hardware. I will illustrate protocol operation and show performance measurements of the first ever NUMA RISC-V system prototype, which is downloadable today for deployment on FPGA.
About the speaker
Dr. Dejan Vucinic is Director of R&D Engineering at Western Digital Research in San Jose, California. His group has been exploring the impact of emerging non-volatile memories, such as MRAM, ReRAM and PCM, on computer systems architecture. Dejan was a summer intern at the L3 experiment at CERN in 1992, and earned his Ph.D. in…
The talk
Credits and licence
- Institution
- CERN
- Department
- CERN Computing Seminar
- Speaker
- Dejan Vucinic
- Year
- 2019
- Language
- English
- Subjects
- Computer science
- Source
- CERN
- Licence
- CERN, as CERN states it. CERN's terms
- Attribution
- © CERN. CERN provides its audiovisual media free of charge for educational and informational use, credited to CERN; this lecture is shown in CERN's own player.
- Who can watch
- CERN gives no rating. Invisible Network shows it to Tweens profiles and older, judged from what the source says about it. How courses are placed