RACCEX: Towards Remote Accelerated Computing Environments

The use of accelerators in computing facilities that employ heterogeneity in order to achieve higher performance has become prominent in the past years. Accelerators lie on the hearts of modern data center and computing facilities, powering the majority of the top ten super-computers in the world. They are essential for the modern computing landscape, implementing custom architecture in order to provide efficient scalable processing power targeting a wide range of scientific domains. In this paper, we address the challenge of making accelerator resources remotely accessible. We present RACCEX, a middleware framework that enables efficient Remote ACCelerator EXecution. For our proof-of-concept, we target the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor. Our proposed solution allows users of lightweight nodes to offload applications remotely on Xeon Phi accelerators. RACCEX intercepts SCIF transport layer calls and forwards them to a remote server equipped with one or more accelerators. Preliminary evaluation of our prototype exhibits promising results with RACCEX framework being able to retain the virtualization overhead up to 10% for large messages compared to the native execution in terms of latency.