Generic System Calls for GPUs

Vesely, Jan and Basu, Arkaprava and Bhattacharjee, Abhishek and Loh, Gabriel H and Oskin, Mark and Reinhardt, Steven K (2018) Generic System Calls for GPUs. In: 45th ACM/IEEE Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), JUN 01-06, 2018, Los Angeles, CA, pp. 843-856.

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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.

Item Type:	Conference Proceedings
Series.:	Conference Proceedings Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture
Publisher:	IEEE
Additional Information:	45th ACM/IEEE Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), Los Angeles, CA, JUN 01-06, 2018
Keywords:	accelerators and domain-specific architecture; graphics oriented architecture; multicore and parallel architectures; virtualization and OS; GPUs
Department/Centre:	Division of Electrical Sciences > Computer Science & Automation
Date Deposited:	15 Mar 2019 05:32
Last Modified:	15 Mar 2019 05:32
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/61962

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