Title
Chimera: Collaborative Preemption for Multitasking on a Shared GPU
Abstract
The demand for multitasking on graphics processing units (GPUs) is constantly increasing as they have become one of the default components on modern computer systems along with traditional processors (CPUs). Preemptive multitasking on CPUs has been primarily supported through context switching. However, the same preemption strategy incurs substantial overhead due to the large context in GPUs. The overhead comes in two dimensions: a preempting kernel suffers from a long preemption latency, and the system throughput is wasted during the switch. Without precise control over the large preemption overhead, multitasking on GPUs has little use for applications with strict latency requirements. In this paper, we propose Chimera, a collaborative preemption approach that can precisely control the overhead for multitasking on GPUs. Chimera first introduces streaming multiprocessor (SM) flushing, which can instantly preempt an SM by detecting and exploiting idempotent execution. Chimera utilizes flushing collaboratively with two previously proposed preemption techniques for GPUs, namely context switching and draining to minimize throughput overhead while achieving a required preemption latency. Evaluations show that Chimera violates the deadline for only 0.2% of preemption requests when a 15us preemption latency constraint is used. For multi-programmed workloads, Chimera can improve the average normalized turnaround time by 5.5x, and system throughput by 12.2%.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1145/2694344.2694346
ASPLOS
Keywords
Field
DocType
graphics processing unit,multiprocessing/multiprogramming/multitasking,preemptive multitasking,context switch,idempotence,graphics processors
Preemption,Latency (engineering),Computer science,Parallel computing,Real-time computing,Multiprocessing,Turnaround time,Throughput,Human multitasking,Graphics processing unit,Context switch
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
43
1
0163-5964
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
49
1.24
25
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jason Jong Kyu Park1904.68
Yongjun Park227720.15
Scott Mahlke34811312.08