Resolving the GPU responsiveness dilemma through program transformations

Abstract

The emerging integrated CPU–GPU architectures facilitate short computational kernels to utilize GPU acceleration. Evidence has shown that, on such systems, the GPU control responsiveness (how soon the host program finds out about the completion of a GPU kernel) is essential for the overall performance. This study identifies the GPU responsiveness dilemma: host busy polling responds quickly, but at the expense of high energy consumption and interference with co-running CPU programs; interrupt-based notification minimizes energy and CPU interference costs, but suffers from substantial response delay. We present a program level solution that wakes up the host program in anticipation of GPU kernel completion. We systematically explore the design space of an anticipatory wakeup scheme through a timer-delayed wakeup or kernel splitting-based pre-completion notification. Experiments show that our proposed technique can achieve the best of both worlds, high responsiveness with low power and CPU costs, for a wide range of GPU workloads.