Title
Generic System Calls for GPUs.
Abstract
GPUs are becoming first-class compute citizens and increasingly support programmability-enhancing features such as shared virtual memory and hardware cache coherence. This enables them to run a wider variety of programs. However, a key aspect of general-purpose programming where GPUs still have room for improvement is the ability to invoke system calls. We explore how to directly invoke system calls from GPUs. We examine how system calls can be integrated with GPGPU programming models, where thousands of threads are organized in a hierarchy of execution groups. To answer questions on GPU system call usage and efficiency, we implement Genesys, a generic GPU system call interface for Linux. Numerous architectural and OS issues are considered and subtle changes to Linux are necessary, as the existing kernel assumes that only CPUs invoke system calls. We assess the performance of Genesys using micro-benchmarks and applications that exercise system calls for signals, memory management, filesystems, and networking.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1109/ISCA.2018.00075
ISCA
Keywords
Field
DocType
accelerators and domain-specific architecture, graphics oriented architecture, multicore and parallel architectures, virtualization and OS, GPUs
Programming paradigm,Computer science,Instruction set,Parallel computing,Thread (computing),Memory management,System call,General-purpose computing on graphics processing units,Hierarchy,Operating system,Cache coherence
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1063-6897
978-1-5386-5984-7
3
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.37
16
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ján Veselý1442.59
Arkaprava Basu2114540.24
Abhishek Bhattacharjee353821.22
Gabriel H. Loh4121.85
Mark Oskin590676.63
Steven K. Reinhardt63885226.69