Vertical and outboard migration: a progress report

ABSTRACT

The primary method for gaining performance improvement on a fixed-hardware architecture is to tailor the soft components, i.e. the application program, the operating system, or the firmware, to the performance requirements. This paper deals with two specific forms of performance tuning called vertical and outboard migration. These terms refer respectively to migrating (pieces of) functions from higher levels to lower levels in a software/firmware/hardware hierarchy and to migrating such functionality to auxiliary processors such as I/O processors which can run in parallel with the CPU to offload it. The performance gains in vertical migration result from the elimination of CPU overhead, while those in outboard migration result from the ability to offload the CPU and have separate (special-purpose) processors execute the migrated code asynchronously and in parallel with CPU execution.

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