Efficient Kernel Management on GPUs

Abstract

As the complexity of applications continues to grow, each new generation of GPUs has been equipped with advanced architectural features and more resources to sustain its performance acceleration capability. Recent GPUs have been featured with concurrent kernel execution, which is designed to improve the resource utilization by executing multiple kernels simultaneously. However, prior systems only achieve limited performance improvement as they do not optimize the thread-level parallelism (TLP) and model the resource contention for the concurrently executing kernels. In this paper, we design a framework that optimizes the performance and energy-efficiency for multiple kernel execution on GPUs. It employs two key techniques. First, we develop an algorithm to adjust the TLP for the concurrently executing kernels. Second, we employ cache bypassing to mitigate the cache contention. Experiments indicate that our framework can improve performance by 1.42X on average (energy-efficiency by 1.33X on average), compared with the default concurrent kernel execution framework.