Isometry
Zhihao Jia, Sean Treichler, Galen M Shipman, Patrick S. McCormick, Alex Aiken · 2018
Data transfers in parallel systems have a significant impact on the performance of applications. Most existing systems generally support only data transfers between memories with a direct hardware connection and have limited facilities for handling transformations to the data's layout in memory. As a result, to move data between memories that are not directly connected, higher levels of the software stack must explicitly divide a multi-hop transfer into a sequence of single-hop transfers and decide how and where to perform data layout conversions if needed. This approach results in inefficiencies, as the higher levels lack enough information to plan transfers as a whole, while the lower level that does the transfer sees only the individual single-hop requests.