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arXiv · 2609.06125

WaferTrans: Enabling IOMMU-free Distributed Virtual Address Translation for Wafer-scale GPUs

Xinru Tang·Jingxiang Hou·Guanghong Wu·Yang Hu·Shouyi Yin
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Abstract

Wafer-scale GPUs (WSGs) provide sufficient on-wafer bandwidth to make near-lossless Unified Memory feasible. However, existing designs still rely on a CPU-IOMMU to translate remote virtual-address accesses. This centralized mechanism scales poorly to tens of GPU dies: translation requests must traverse costly off-wafer hierarchies and contend for limited CPU-side resources, making address translation a critical bottleneck. We propose WaferTrans, an IOMMU-free distributed virtual-address translation design for WSGs. WaferTrans introduces PTE Presence Consistency (PTE-PC), a lightweight consistency model that tracks PTE insertions and removals, and equips each GPU with a PTE Presence Directory (PPD) that locates the GPU holding a requested PTE. It further employs a distributed PTE-PC mapping and a cooperative query mechanism to localize PTE-PC maintenance while preserving complete lookup coverage. Together, these mechanisms enable the GPU array to resolve remote translations within the wafer, eliminating its dependence on the CPU-IOMMU. Compared with the SOTA Trans-FW design, WaferTrans improves performance by 2.5x on average.

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Xinru Tang, Jingxiang Hou, Guanghong Wu, Yang Hu, Shouyi Yin. 2026-09-05. WaferTrans: Enabling IOMMU-free Distributed Virtual Address Translation for Wafer-scale GPUs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06125

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