METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR CHAINING MULTIPLE INDEPENDENT HARDWARE ACCELERATION OPERATIONS

摘要

Multiple hardware accelerators can be used to efficiently perform processes that would otherwise be performed by general purpose hardware running software. The software overhead and bus bandwidth associated with running multiple hardware acceleration processes can be reduced by chaining multiple independent hardware acceleration operations within a circuit card assembly. Multiple independent hardware accelerators can be configured on a single circuit card assembly that is coupled to a computing device. The computing device can generate a playlist of hardware acceleration operations identifying hardware accelerators and associated accelerator options. A task management unit on the circuit card assembly receives the playlist and schedules the hardware acceleration operations such that multiple acceleration operations may be successively chained together without intervening data exchanges with the computing device.