A growing demand for hyperscale services has compelled hyperscalers to deploy more compute resources at an unprecedented pace, further accelerated by the demise of Dennard scaling. Meanwhile, a considerable portion of the compute resources are consumed to execute common functions present across the hyperscale services, i.e., datacenter taxes. These challenges motivated many to explore specialized accelerators for these functions. Leading such a technology trend, Intel has integrated diverse on-chip accelerators into its recent flagship datacenter CPU products. Furthermore, to support the easy and efficient use of these accelerators for successful deployment in production hyperscale services, Intel has developed a hardware/software ecosystem. In this paper, we first focus on Intel’s holistic efforts to build the hardware/software ecosystem, presenting key SoC-level features that facilitate efficient CPU-accelerator interaction, effortless programming and use, and scalable accelerator sharing and virtualization. Next, we delve into the functions, microarchitectures, and software stacks of three new on-chip accelerators: Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA), In-memory Analytics Accelerator (IAA), and Dynamic Load Balancer (DLB). Lastly, we demonstrate that Intel’s on-chip accelerators can not only significantly reduce the datacenter taxes but also accelerate data-intensive applications essential for hyperscale services, with little effort to use the accelerators.

To best exploit the potential of the grid, it is necessary to "grid-enable" legacy applications that were not originally developed to run on a grid. In this paper, a generic framework to grid-enable legacy applications is presented. In particular, this paper focuses on a general approach to model and represent an application in a way that is supportive of the key properties of the grid-enabling framework: generality, automatic generation and integration of grid applications, plug-and-play deployment, and interoperability. Based on the model, a configuration language is developed to describe a wide range of command-line applications and their execution requirements. It is easy to use and does not require the application enabler to know the details of the grid middleware. A case study is presented to illustrate the automated grid-enabling of a legacy application in In-VIGO (in-virtual information grid organizations), a grid computing infrastructure that makes extensive use of visualization technology

This poster briefly introduces two resource-virtualization techniques needed for the creation of virtual(ized) grids: virtual networks and virtual application services. The former provides bidirectional network connectivity even in the presence of firewalls, network address translation gateways and proxies by creating virtual routers and virtual IP space. The later allows automated creation and deployment of legacy applications into grids by generating a virtual application service that allows the execution in shared resources of multiple isolated application instances with customized behavior.

This paper describes a scalable approach to the enabling of legacy scientific applications on computing grids using a service-oriented architecture. In the context of this paper grid-enabling means turning an existing application, installed on a grid resource, into a service and generating the application-specific user interfaces to use that application through a Web portal. Scalability is achieved by providing a common abstraction for a category of applications and providing a "generic" application service to wrap those applications as services. The focus of this paper's approach is on grid-enabling "command-oriented" scientific applications. The novel aspect of the approach is that the entire process -from turning an application into a service to the user-interface generation for that application - is done automatically, without requiring coding or grid-system downtime. Portlet technology is used to dynamically generate application-specific interfaces. Further, the approach makes it possible to customize the applications for different user groups by way of simplifying, restricting or composing the functionalities of applications. The approach is useful for building grid portals on which a large number of applications need to be dynamically enabled.