Hardware coherent computational expansion memory

Abstract

Embodiments herein describe transferring ownership of data (e.g., cachelines or blocks of data comprising multiple cachelines) from a host to hardware in an I/O device. In one embodiment, the host and I/O device (e.g., an accelerator) are part of a cache-coherent system where ownership of data can be transferred from a home agent (HA) in the host to a local HA in the I/O device—e.g., a computational slave agent (CSA). That way, a function on the I/O device (e.g., an accelerator function) can request data from the local HA without these requests having to be sent to the host HA. Further, the accelerator function can indicate whether the local HA tracks the data on a cacheline-basis or by a data block (e.g., multiple cachelines). This provides flexibility that can reduce overhead from tracking the data, depending on the function's desired use of the data.