Hardware Acceleration with Zero-Copy Memory Management for Heterogeneous Computing

The ROS2 software framework is increasingly prevalent in component-based applications for robots and other autonomous systems. Recently added ROS2 features to support zero-copy semantics may significantly reduce latency and latency variation when passing data from one component to another. Additionally, there is a growing trend of developing autonomous robotic systems on heterogeneous computing platforms to exploit hardware acceleration. However, support for portable and reusable zero-copy semantics on heterogeneous compute systems is limited. Such systems thus must either use low-level techniques to manage memory operations directly, which may be tedious and error-prone, or they may not adequately address substantial memory overheads that can arise from repeatedly copying messages and data into and out of device memory associated with GPUs and FPGAs. Towards addressing that limitation of the current state of the art, this paper introduces Hazcat, a new zero-copy framework that automatically performs device memory operations when needed, and avoids copying and other costly operations otherwise. Hazcat is integrated specifically with ROS2 but is also designed for portability to other component-based software frameworks.