VINETALK Framework released in January 2018

FORTH announced the open source release of the VINETALK framework in a talk at the ENESCE workshop of HiPEAC 2018. The software is licensed under the Apache License v2.0.

VINETALK is a fundamental component of the VINEYARD stack as it addresses two main issues that are caused by the use of accelerators in datacenters. First, accelerators remain hard to use, and developers need to interface them with their applications through a diverse set of low-level APIs. Second, there is no mechanism today that enables sharing of accelerators, which is a common practice for reducing operating costs. VINETALK is a software tool that reduces the communication complexity between application software and accelerator hardware, and allows sharing of GPUs and FPGAs across applications. Furthermore, VINETALK allows applications to transparently access GPU, and FPGA accelerators, regardless of whether they run locally on a server, or in an Apache Mesos – managed cluster.

VINETALK consists of three major components:

1) A software interface, which exposes accelerators as task queues, called Virtual Access Queues (VAQs), to applications.

2) A software controller that implements a communication channel over shared memory and enables sharing of acceleration resources. It allows multiple processes to issue tasks and transfer data to accelerators.

3) A hardware interface, which simplifies the addition of new kernels by hardware developers.

VINETALK can be found HERE