Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture overview

An Intel MIC X100 device is a PCIe form factor add-in coprocessor card based on the Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture that runs a Linux OS. It is a PCIe endpoint in a platform and therefore implements the three required standard address spaces i.e. configuration, memory and I/O. The host OS loads a device driver as is typical for PCIe devices. The card itself runs a bootstrap after reset that transfers control to the card OS downloaded from the host driver. The host driver supports OSPM suspend and resume operations. It shuts down the card during suspend and reboots the card OS during resume. The card OS as shipped by Intel is a Linux kernel with modifications for the X100 devices.

Since it is a PCIe card, it does not have the ability to host hardware devices for networking, storage and console. We provide these devices on X100 coprocessors thus enabling a self-bootable equivalent environment for applications. A key benefit of our solution is that it leverages the standard virtio framework for network, disk and console devices, though in our case the virtio framework is used across a PCIe bus. A Virtio Over PCIe (VOP) driver allows creating user space backends or devices on the host which are used to probe virtio drivers for these devices on the MIC card. The existing VRINGH infrastructure in the kernel is used to access virtio rings from the host. The card VOP driver allows card virtio drivers to communicate with their user space backends on the host via a device page. Ring 3 apps on the host can add, remove and configure virtio devices. A thin MIC specific virtio_config_ops is implemented which is borrowed heavily from previous similar implementations in lguest and s390.

MIC PCIe card has a dma controller with 8 channels. These channels are shared between the host s/w and the card s/w. 0 to 3 are used by host and 4 to 7 by card. As the dma device doesn't show up as PCIe device, 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.

The Coprocessor State Management (COSM) driver on the host allows for boot, shutdown and reset of Intel MIC devices. It communicates with a COSM "client" driver on the MIC cards over SCIF to perform these functions.

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 the host to initiate DMA's to/from the card using the MIC DMA engine and the fact that the virtio block storage backend can only be on the host:

             +----------+           |             +----------+
             | Card OS  |           |             | Host OS  |
             +----------+           |             +----------+
                                    |
      +-------+ +--------+ +------+ | +---------+  +--------+ +--------+
      | Virtio| |Virtio  | |Virtio| | |Virtio   |  |Virtio  | |Virtio  |
      | Net   | |Console | |Block | | |Net      |  |Console | |Block   |
      | Driver| |Driver  | |Driver| | |backend  |  |backend | |backend |
      +---+---+ +---+----+ +--+---+ | +---------+  +----+---+ +--------+
          |         |         |     |      |            |         |
          |         |         |     |User  |            |         |
          |         |         |     |------|------------|--+------|-------
          +---------+---------+     |Kernel                |
                    |               |                      |
+---------+     +---+----+ +------+ | +------+ +------+ +--+---+  +-------+
|MIC DMA  |     |  VOP   | | SCIF | | | SCIF | | COSM | | VOP  |  |MIC DMA|
+---+-----+     +---+----+ +--+---+ | +--+---+ +--+---+ +------+  +----+--+
    |               |         |     |    |        |                    |
+---+-----+     +---+----+ +--+---+ | +--+---+ +--+---+ +------+  +----+--+
|MIC      |     |  VOP   | |SCIF  | | |SCIF  | | COSM | | VOP  |  | MIC   |
|HW Bus   |     |  HW Bus| |HW Bus| | |HW Bus| | Bus  | |HW Bus|  |HW Bus |
+---------+     +--------+ +--+---+ | +--+---+ +------+ +------+  +-------+
    |               |         |     |       |     |                    |
    |   +-----------+--+      |     |       |    +---------------+     |
    |   |Intel MIC     |      |     |       |    |Intel MIC      |     |
    |   |Card Driver   |      |     |       |    |Host Driver    |     |
    +---+--------------+------+     |       +----+---------------+-----+
               |                    |                   |
           +-------------------------------------------------------------+
           |                                                             |
           |                    PCIe Bus                                 |
           +-------------------------------------------------------------+