OmniX: An accelerator-centric OS for omni-programmable systems

Future systemswill be omni-programmable: alongside CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs, theywill execute user code near-storage, near-network, near-memory, or on other Near-X accelerator Units, NXUs. This paper explores the design space ofOS support for omni-programmable systems, aiming to simplify the development of efficient applications that span multiple heterogeneous processors and near-data accelerators. OmniX is an accelerator-centric OS architecture that extends standard OS abstractions, such as task execution and I/O, into NXUs while maintaining a coherent viewof the systemamong all the processors. OmniX enables NXUs to directly invoke tasks and access I/O services among themselves, excluding the CPU from the performance-critical control plane operations. The host CPU serves as a controller - for protection, device configuration and monitoring.We discuss the hardware trends that motivate ourwork, outline OmniX design principles, and sketch the core implementation ideas while highlighting missing hardware features, in the hope of motivating hardware vendors to implement them soon.