Gateway Fabric Ports
AssigneeGraphcore Limited
InventorsOla Torudbakken, Daniel John Pelham Wilkinson, Brian Manula
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A gateway for interfacing a host with a subsystem for acting as a work accelerator to the host. The gateway enables the transfer of batches of data to the subsystem at precompiled data exchange synchronisation points. The gateway acts to route data between accelerators which are connected in a scaled system of multiple gateways and accelerators using a global address space set up at compile time of an application to run on the computer system.
Claims21
A computer system comprising:
- a first accelerator configured to process data and to generate result data;
- and
- a first gateway coupled to the first accelerator and a gateway interface for connection to a second gateway for conveying data for processing by a second accelerator, wherein the first accelerator and the second accelerator form a synchronisation zone in which a synchronisation barrier acts between a compute phase and an exchange phase in the synchronization zone,
- wherein the first gateway is configured to receive a plurality of messages from the first accelerator, a first message of the plurality of messages comprising result data and a destination address indicating a storage location to receive the result data, the first gateway further configured to check the destination address and to route the first message to the gateway interface in response to the destination address indicating the storage location on the second accelerator.
A method of exchanging data between first and second accelerators in a computer system, each accelerator configured to process data and to generate result data, wherein the first accelerator is coupled to a first gateway, wherein the first gateway has a gateway interface for connection to a second gateway for conveying data for processing by the second accelerator, wherein the first accelerator and the second accelerator form a synchronisation zone in which a synchronisation barrier acts between a compute phase and an exchange phase in the synchronisation zone, the method comprising:
- receiving a plurality of messages from the first accelerator, a first message of the plurality of messages comprising result data and a destination address indicating a storage location to receive the result data;
- and
- checking the destination address and routing the first message to the gateway interface in response to the destination address indicating the storage location on the second accelerator.
The computer program stored on transitory or non-transitory media which comprises a set of computer readable instructions which when executed cause a gateway to:
- receive a plurality of messages from a first accelerator of the gateway, a first message of the plurality of messages comprising result data and a destination address indicating a storage location to receive the result data;
- and
- check the destination address and route the first message to a gateway interface of the gateway in response to the destination address indicating the storage location on a second accelerator.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.