Kernel-as-a-Service

With the slowing of Moore's law and decline of Dennard scaling, computing systems increasingly rely on specialized hardware accelerators in addition to general-purpose compute units. Increased hardware heterogeneity necessitates disaggregating applications into workflows of fine-grained tasks that run on a diverse set of CPUs and accelerators. Current accelerator delivery models cannot support such applications efficiently, as (1) the overhead of managing accelerators erases performance benefits for fine-grained tasks; (2) exclusive accelerator use per task leads to underutilization; and (3) specialization increases complexity for developers.