[2605.28717] OpenURMA: A Clean-Room Open Implementation of the Unified Bus Protocol

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arXiv:2605.28717 (cs)

[Submitted on 27 May 2026]

Title:OpenURMA: A Clean-Room Open Implementation of the Unified Bus Protocol

Authors:Bojie Li<br>View a PDF of the paper titled OpenURMA: A Clean-Room Open Implementation of the Unified Bus Protocol, by Bojie Li

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Abstract:Modern datacenter RDMA is bottlenecked at the network interface, not the wire. A NIC running RoCE or InfiniBand holds per-connection state for every (application, remote-endpoint) pair - hundreds of megabytes at 1024-application fanout - and pays a four-traversal PCIe round trip on a 64-byte operation, inflating latency an order of magnitude beyond the wire. Both follow from the Queue Pair over PCIe abstraction RDMA inherits from InfiniBand.

Huawei's Unified Bus (UB), a public 2025 specification, changes the abstraction: it decouples per-application endpoint state from per-host transport state so connection context grows additively, exposes ordering as opt-in, and reaches remote memory through native CPU load/store to an on-chip-bus controller. UB ships in Huawei's closed Ascend 950 silicon.

OpenURMA is the first clean-room open implementation of UB's transport and transaction layers, realised at three tiers - synthesisable RTL on Alveo U50, a cycle-level two-node SystemC simulator, and a gem5 full-system scaffold - each with a matched OpenRoCE (RoCEv2 RC) baseline. The contribution is the implementation, harness, and controlled comparison closed silicon does not admit. On the canonical 64-byte remote fetch - LOAD on UB-spec Sec.8.3, READ on RoCEv2 RC - UB's load/store path delivers ~500 ns end-to-end, 4.37x below the matched baseline (2186 ns), sustains 2.80x higher throughput, and fits in ~14% of a U50's LUTs.

Subjects:

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Hardware Architecture (cs.AR); Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI)

Cite as:<br>arXiv:2605.28717 [cs.AI]

(or<br>arXiv:2605.28717v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.28717

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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history<br>From: Bojie Li [view email]<br>[v1]<br>Wed, 27 May 2026 16:38:57 UTC (968 KB)

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