ACCFS - Operating System Integration of Computational Accelerators Using a VFS Approach

For a number of applications integrating specialized computational accelerators into a general-purpose computing environment yields more performance per watt and per dollar than a pure multi-core approach. In contrast to fully application-specific hybrid solutions we offer the advantage to maintain traditional programming models and development environments to a certain extent. In this paper we introduce an open generic operating system interface concept what we call Accelerator File System (ACCFS) for integrating application accelerators into Linux based platforms. By describing the proposed concepts and interface we contribute to a broader discussion of this challenging topic.