We attended the Open Domain-Specific Architecture (ODSA) workshop on \”Prototyping Chiplet Based Open Data Accelerators\” at the end of August 2021. ODSA is part of the Open Compute Project (OCP). The chiplet approach to building a systems-in-package (SiP) consists of integrating silicon die from one or more vendors onto a common package. The band of wires (BoW) standard allows two chipsets to communicate using one or more protocols such as CHI, AXI4(5) as well as point-to-point wires using a set of low latency high-speed links. The benefit of the chiplet approach is it allows vendors to build their own hardware accelerator in silicon to optimize targeted applications using the BoW for off-chip communication.
An emerging paradigm presented at the workshop was computational storage and the corresponding system architecture changes to move computation closer to storage. Instead of copying data from I/O to main memory, then decrypting or uncompressing it, followed by copying back to user memory, an accelerator in a storage SiP can eliminate one or more data copies. It could also support a bump in the fabric model allowing processing to occur as data is read from I/O by the accelerator en route to a CPU or GPU.
