Vertical and outboard migration: a progress report

Authors:
Andrew Heller;Andries Van Dam
Affiliations:
IBM Corporation, Santa Theresa, California;Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island
Venue:
AFIPS '81 Proceedings of the May 4-7, 1981, national computer conference
Year:
1981

Citing 6
Cited 0

Introduction to VLSI Systems

Introduction to VLSI Systems
Object-based computer architecture

ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News
A hardware implementation of capability-based addressing

ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News
Structured systems and their performance improvement through vertical migration

Structured systems and their performance improvement through vertical migration
Vertical Migration for Performance Enhancement in Layered Hardware/Firmware/Software Systems

Computer
The Effects-of Emerging Technology and Emulation Requirements on Microprogramming

IEEE Transactions on Computers

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

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.