NDLI: ActivePointers:a case for software address translation on GPUs

Content Provider	ACM Digital Library
Author	Shahar, Sagi Bergman, Shai Silberstein, Mark
Abstract	Modern discrete GPUs have been the processors of choice for accelerating compute-intensive applications, but using them in large-scale data processing is extremely challenging. Unfortunately, they do not provide important I/O abstractions long established in the CPU context, such as memory mapped files, which shield programmers from the complexity of buffer and I/O device management. However, implementing these abstractions on GPUs poses a problem: the limited GPU virtual memory system provides no address space management and page fault handling mechanisms to GPU developers, and does not allow modifications to memory mappings for running GPU programs. We implement ActivePointers, a software address translation layer and paging system that introduces native support for page faults and virtual address space management to GPU programs, and enables the implementation of fully functional memory mapped files on commodity GPUs. Files mapped into GPU memory are accessed using active pointers, which behave like regular pointers but access the GPU page cache under the hood, and trigger page faults which are handled on the GPU. We design and evaluate a number of novel mechanisms, including a translation cache in hardware registers and translation aggregation for deadlock-free page fault handling of threads in a single warp. We extensively evaluate ActivePointers on commodity NVIDIA GPUs using microbenchmarks, and also implement a complex image processing application that constructs a photo collage from a subset of 10 million images stored in a 40GB file. The GPU implementation maps the entire file into GPU memory and accesses it via active pointers. The use of active pointers adds only up to 1% to the application's runtime, while enabling speedups of up to 3.9× over a combined CPU+GPU implementation and 2.6× over a 12-core CPU-only implementation which uses AVX vector instructions.
Starting Page	596
Ending Page	608
Page Count	13
File Format	PDF
ISSN	01635964
DOI	10.1145/3007787.3001200
Journal	ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News (CARN)
Volume Number	44
Issue Number	3
Language	English
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Publisher Date	1981-04-01
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Operating systems Memory management Parallel architectures
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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