Disaggregation and Sharing of I/O Devices in Cloud Data Centers

Input/output (I/O) devices such as a graphics processing unit and a solid-state drive are inserted into I/O slots of a host in data center platforms. With this sort of configuration the I/O devices are used exclusively by the host with resultant inefficient resource usage. In addition, the maximum number of I/O devices that can be assigned to each host is limited by the number of its I/O slots. This paper proposes a method to solve the resource usage inefficiency and assignment limitation by disaggregating I/O devices from hosts. An I/O device accommodated in a device pool is interconnected with multiple hosts by a standard Ethernet and can be flexibly assigned to one of them. Introducing assignment flexibility of I/O devices among hosts improves the resource usage efficiency and enables as many I/O devices as desired being assigned to each host. The authors further propose a method that enables an I/O device to be simultaneously shared among multiple hosts and multiple I/O packets to be aggregated into an Ethernet frame to suppress the performance overhead of the device disaggregation. Evaluation results showed that I/O devices that are compliant to PCI Express are shared with the overhead up to 27 percent.