Title
Cooperative Kernels: GPU Multitasking for Blocking Algorithms (Extended Version).
Abstract
There is growing interest in accelerating irregular data-parallel algorithms on GPUs. These algorithms are typically blocking, so they require fair scheduling. But GPU programming models (e.g. OpenCL) do not mandate fair scheduling, and GPU schedulers are unfair in practice. Current approaches avoid this issue by exploiting scheduling quirks of todayu0027s GPUs in a manner that does not allow the GPU to be shared with other workloads (such as graphics rendering tasks). We propose cooperative kernels, an extension to the traditional GPU programming model geared towards writing blocking algorithms. Workgroups of a cooperative kernel are fairly scheduled, and multitasking is supported via a small set of language extensions through which the kernel and scheduler cooperate. We describe a prototype implementation of a cooperative kernel framework implemented in OpenCL 2.0 and evaluate our approach by porting a set of blocking GPU applications to cooperative kernels and examining their performance under multitasking. Our prototype exploits no vendor-specific hardware, driver or compiler support, thus our results provide a lower-bound on the efficiency with which cooperative kernels can be implemented in practice.
Year
Venue
Field
2017
arXiv: Programming Languages
Graphics,Kernel (linear algebra),Scheduling (computing),Computer science,Algorithm,Theoretical computer science,Compiler,Porting,General-purpose computing on graphics processing units,Human multitasking,Rendering (computer graphics)
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Journal
abs/1707.01989
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.35
16
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Tyler Sorensen11099.42
Hugues Evrard2314.36
Alastair F. Donaldson366152.35