计算机体系结构论文iGPU Exception Support and Speculative Execution on GPU(isca2012).pdfVIP

iGPU: Exception Support and Speculative Execution on GPUs Jaikrishnan Menon, Marc de Kruijf, Karthikeyan Sankaralingam Department of Computer Sciences University of Wisconsin-Madison {menon, dekruijf, karu}@ Abstract the evolution of traditional CPUs to illuminate why this pro- gression appears natural and imminent. Since the introduction of fully programmable vertex Just as CPU programmers were forced to explicitly man- shader hardware, GPU computing has made tremendous age CPU memories in the days before virtual memory, for advances. Exception support and speculative execution are almost a decade, GPU programmers directly and explicitly the next steps to expand the scope and improve the usabil- managed the GPU memory hierarchy. The recent release ity of GPUs. However, traditional mechanisms to support of NVIDIA’s Fermi architecture and AMD’s Fusion archi- exceptions and speculative execution are highly intrusive to tecture, however, has brought GPUs to an inflection point: GPU hardware design. This paper builds on two related in- both architectures implement a unified address space that sights to provide a unified lightweight mechanism for sup- eliminates the need for explicit memory movement to and porting exceptions and speculation on GPUs. from GPU memory structures. Yet, without demand pag- First, we observe that GPU programs can be broken into ing, something taken for granted in the CPU space, pro- code regions that contain little or no live register state at grammers must still explicitly reason