Paper Info
Title
To move or not to move? - page migration for irregular applications in over-subscribed GPU memory systems with DynaMap.
Abstract
This paper focuses on the severe page thrashing problem that can arise when running large irregular memory access applications on limited GPU memory systems. Such memory over-subscription causes very poor performance in the currently on demand (eager) or page-group granularity access-counter based (lazy) page migration mechanisms found in NVIDIA\u0027s UVM drivers. Our detailed analysis of these executions reveals a very novel insight: rather than duplicate the responsibility of catering to both temporal and spatial locality in both GPU caches and its memory, it is better for the former to simply cater to the temporal aspect, and the latter to the spatial aspect, thereby saving precious memory system capacities. Based on this, we build an adaptive page migration scheme, called DynaMap, that (i) uses a compiler pass to instrument off-the-shelf CUDA UVM applications for spatial utilization tracking, (ii) dynamically sets a spatial utilization threshold to determine migration based on memory pressure and access characteristics, and (iii) enhances the current NVIDIA UVM driver to dynamically migrate the page (from the host memory to the GPU) based on the threshold. Using 7 irregular applications from public benchmark suites, we implement DynaMap on a real system with different over-subscription ratios to show speedups as much as 2.5X (34% on the average) over state-of-the-art UVM implementations.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1145/3456727.3463766
SYSTOR
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Chia-Hao Chang100.34
Adithya Kumar231.38
Anand Sivasubramaniam3102.47