summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/Documentation/mic
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
authorSudeep Dutt <sudeep.dutt@intel.com>2015-04-29 05:32:28 -0700
committerGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>2015-05-24 12:13:36 -0700
commit7df20f2d893db42eaa1ea1e30a2573c971ec9238 (patch)
tree372f796f0c48006754facac07edda9ea390b88c7 /Documentation/mic
parent0d09f1a54d9710548c9af72dc1564c8291a5307c (diff)
downloadlwn-7df20f2d893db42eaa1ea1e30a2573c971ec9238.tar.gz
lwn-7df20f2d893db42eaa1ea1e30a2573c971ec9238.zip
misc: mic: SCIF header file and IOCTL interface
This patch introduces the SCIF documentation in the header file and describes the IOCTL interface for user mode. mic_overview.txt is updated with documentation on SCIF and a new document describing SCIF in more details is available in scif_overview.txt. Reviewed-by: Nikhil Rao <nikhil.rao@intel.com> Reviewed-by: Ashutosh Dixit <ashutosh.dixit@intel.com> Signed-off-by: Sudeep Dutt <sudeep.dutt@intel.com> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/mic')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/mic/mic_overview.txt28
-rw-r--r--Documentation/mic/scif_overview.txt98
2 files changed, 114 insertions, 12 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/mic/mic_overview.txt b/Documentation/mic/mic_overview.txt
index 77c541802ad9..1a2f2c8ec59e 100644
--- a/Documentation/mic/mic_overview.txt
+++ b/Documentation/mic/mic_overview.txt
@@ -24,6 +24,10 @@ a virtual bus called mic bus is created and virtual dma devices are
created on it by the host/card drivers. On host the channels are private
and used only by the host driver to transfer data for the virtio devices.
+The Symmetric Communication Interface (SCIF (pronounced as skiff)) is a
+low level communications API across PCIe currently implemented for MIC.
+More details are available at scif_overview.txt.
+
Here is a block diagram of the various components described above. The
virtio backends are situated on the host rather than the card given better
single threaded performance for the host compared to MIC, the ability of
@@ -47,18 +51,18 @@ the fact that the virtio block storage backend can only be on the host.
| | | Virtio over PCIe IOCTLs |
| | +--------------------------+
+-----------+ | | | +-----------+
-| MIC DMA | | | | | MIC DMA |
-| Driver | | | | | Driver |
-+-----------+ | | | +-----------+
- | | | | |
-+---------------+ | | | +----------------+
-|MIC virtual Bus| | | | |MIC virtual Bus |
-+---------------+ | | | +----------------+
- | | | | |
- | +--------------+ | +---------------+ |
- | |Intel MIC | | |Intel MIC | |
- +---|Card Driver | | |Host Driver | |
- +--------------+ | +---------------+-----+
+| MIC DMA | | +----------+ | +-----------+ | | MIC DMA |
+| Driver | | | SCIF | | | SCIF | | | Driver |
++-----------+ | +----------+ | +-----------+ | +-----------+
+ | | | | | | |
++---------------+ | +-----+-----+ | +-----+-----+ | +---------------+
+|MIC virtual Bus| | |SCIF HW Bus| | |SCIF HW BUS| | |MIC virtual Bus|
++---------------+ | +-----------+ | +-----+-----+ | +---------------+
+ | | | | | | |
+ | +--------------+ | | | +---------------+ |
+ | |Intel MIC | | | | |Intel MIC | |
+ +---|Card Driver +----+ | | |Host Driver | |
+ +--------------+ | +----+---------------+-----+
| | |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| |
diff --git a/Documentation/mic/scif_overview.txt b/Documentation/mic/scif_overview.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..0a280d986731
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/mic/scif_overview.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,98 @@
+The Symmetric Communication Interface (SCIF (pronounced as skiff)) is a low
+level communications API across PCIe currently implemented for MIC. Currently
+SCIF provides inter-node communication within a single host platform, where a
+node is a MIC Coprocessor or Xeon based host. SCIF abstracts the details of
+communicating over the PCIe bus while providing an API that is symmetric
+across all the nodes in the PCIe network. An important design objective for SCIF
+is to deliver the maximum possible performance given the communication
+abilities of the hardware. SCIF has been used to implement an offload compiler
+runtime and OFED support for MPI implementations for MIC coprocessors.
+
+==== SCIF API Components ====
+The SCIF API has the following parts:
+1. Connection establishment using a client server model
+2. Byte stream messaging intended for short messages
+3. Node enumeration to determine online nodes
+4. Poll semantics for detection of incoming connections and messages
+5. Memory registration to pin down pages
+6. Remote memory mapping for low latency CPU accesses via mmap
+7. Remote DMA (RDMA) for high bandwidth DMA transfers
+8. Fence APIs for RDMA synchronization
+
+SCIF exposes the notion of a connection which can be used by peer processes on
+nodes in a SCIF PCIe "network" to share memory "windows" and to communicate. A
+process in a SCIF node initiates a SCIF connection to a peer process on a
+different node via a SCIF "endpoint". SCIF endpoints support messaging APIs
+which are similar to connection oriented socket APIs. Connected SCIF endpoints
+can also register local memory which is followed by data transfer using either
+DMA, CPU copies or remote memory mapping via mmap. SCIF supports both user and
+kernel mode clients which are functionally equivalent.
+
+==== SCIF Performance for MIC ====
+DMA bandwidth comparison between the TCP (over ethernet over PCIe) stack versus
+SCIF shows the performance advantages of SCIF for HPC applications and runtimes.
+
+ Comparison of TCP and SCIF based BW
+
+ Throughput (GB/sec)
+ 8 + PCIe Bandwidth ******
+ + TCP ######
+ 7 + ************************************** SCIF %%%%%%
+ | %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
+ 6 + %%%%
+ | %%
+ | %%%
+ 5 + %%
+ | %%
+ 4 + %%
+ | %%
+ 3 + %%
+ | %
+ 2 + %%
+ | %%
+ | %
+ 1 +
+ + ######################################
+ 0 +++---+++--+--+-+--+--+-++-+--+-++-+--+-++-+-
+ 1 10 100 1000 10000 100000
+ Transfer Size (KBytes)
+
+SCIF allows memory sharing via mmap(..) between processes on different PCIe
+nodes and thus provides bare-metal PCIe latency. The round trip SCIF mmap
+latency from the host to an x100 MIC for an 8 byte message is 0.44 usecs.
+
+SCIF has a user space library which is a thin IOCTL wrapper providing a user
+space API similar to the kernel API in scif.h. The SCIF user space library
+is distributed @ https://software.intel.com/en-us/mic-developer
+
+Here is some pseudo code for an example of how two applications on two PCIe
+nodes would typically use the SCIF API:
+
+Process A (on node A) Process B (on node B)
+
+/* get online node information */
+scif_get_node_ids(..) scif_get_node_ids(..)
+scif_open(..) scif_open(..)
+scif_bind(..) scif_bind(..)
+scif_listen(..)
+scif_accept(..) scif_connect(..)
+/* SCIF connection established */
+
+/* Send and receive short messages */
+scif_send(..)/scif_recv(..) scif_send(..)/scif_recv(..)
+
+/* Register memory */
+scif_register(..) scif_register(..)
+
+/* RDMA */
+scif_readfrom(..)/scif_writeto(..) scif_readfrom(..)/scif_writeto(..)
+
+/* Fence DMAs */
+scif_fence_signal(..) scif_fence_signal(..)
+
+mmap(..) mmap(..)
+
+/* Access remote registered memory */
+
+/* Close the endpoints */
+scif_close(..) scif_close(..)