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Concurrent kernel execution on GPU has proven an effective technique to improve system throughput by maximizing the resource utilization. In order to increase programmability and meet the increasing memory requirements of data-intensive applications, current GPUs support Unified Virtual Memory (UVM), which provides a virtual memory abstraction with demand paging. By allowing applications to oversubscribe GPU memory, UVM provides increased opportunities to share GPU resources across applications. However, in the presence of applications with competing memory requirements, GPU sharing can lead to performance degradation due to thrashing. NVIDIA's Multiple Process Service (MPS) offers the capability to space share bare metal GPUs, thereby enabling cluster workload managers, such as Slurm, to share a single GPU across MPI ranks with limited control over resource partitioning. However, it is not possible to preempt, schedule, or throttle a running GPU process through MPS. These features would enable new OS-managed scheduling policies to be implemented for GPU kernels to dynamically handle resource contention and offer consistent performance. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. We first show how memory oversubscription can impact the performance of concurrent GPU applications. Then, we propose three methods to transparently mitigate memory interference through kernel preemption and scheduling policies. To implement our policies, we develop our own runtime system (PILOT) to serve as an alternative to NVIDIA's MPS. In the presence of memory over-subscription, we noticed a dramatic improvement in the overall throughput when using our scheduling policies and runtime hints.
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Fine-grain Quantitative Analysis of Demand Paging in Unified Virtual Memory
The abstraction of a shared memory space over separate CPU and GPU memory domains has eased the burden of portability for many HPC codebases. However, users pay for ease of use provided by system-managed memory with a moderate-to-high performance overhead. NVIDIA Unified Virtual Memory (UVM) is currently the primary real-world implementation of such abstraction and offers a functionally equivalent testbed for in-depth performance study for both UVM and future Linux Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) compatible systems. The continued advocacy for UVM and HMM motivates improvement of the underlying system. We focus on UVM-based systems and investigate the root causes of UVM overhead, a non-trivial task due to complex interactions of multiple hardware and software constituents and the desired cost granularity. In our prior work, we delved deeply into UVM system architecture and showed internal behaviors of page fault servicing in batches. We provided quantitative evaluation of batch handling for various applications under different scenarios, including prefetching and oversubscription. We revealed that the driver workload depends on the interactions among application access patterns, GPU hardware constraints, and host OS components. Host OS components have significant overhead present across implementations, warranting close attention. This extension furthers our prior study in three aspects: fine-grain cost analysis and breakdown, extension to multiple GPUs, and investigation of platforms with different GPU-GPU interconnects. We take a top-down approach to quantitative batch analysis and uncover how constituent component costs accumulate and overlap, governed by synchronous and asynchronous operations. Our multi-GPU analysis shows reduced cost of GPU-GPU batch workloads compared to CPU-GPU workloads. We further demonstrate that while specialized interconnects, NVLink, can improve batch cost, their benefits are limited by host OS software overhead and GPU oversubscription. This study serves as a proxy for future shared memory systems, such as those that interface with HMM, and the development of interconnects.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1942182
- PAR ID:
- 10566579
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization
- Volume:
- 21
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1544-3566
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 24
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Unified Virtual Memory, Heterogeneous Memory Management, Virtual Memory, GPGPU, Accelerated Computing
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3632953
