Disaggregated heterogeneous data centers promise higher efficiency, lower total costs of ownership, and more flexibility for data-center operators. However, current software stacks can levy a high tax on application performance. Applications and OSes are designed for systems where local PCIe-connected devices are centrally managed by CPUs, but this centralization introduces unnecessary messages through the shared data-center network in a disaggregated system.

This paper explores new opportunities afforded by the growing deployment of compute and I/O accelerators to improve the performance and efficiency of hardware-accelerated computing services in data centers.