The demand for heterogeneous computing, because of its performance and energy efficiency, has made on-chip heterogeneous chip multi-processors (HCMP) become the mainstream computing platform, as the recent trend shows in a wide spectrum of platforms from smartphone application processors to desktop and low-end server processors. The performance of on-chip GPUs is not yet comparable to that of discrete GPU cards, but vendors have integrated more powerful GPUs and this trend will continue in upcoming processors.
In this architecture, several system resources are shared between CPUs and GPUs. The sharing of system resources enables easier and cheaper data transfer between CPUs and GPUs, but it also causes resource contention problems between cores. The resource sharing problem has existed since the homogeneous (CPU-only) chip-multi processor (CMP) was introduced. However, resource sharing in HCMPs shows different aspects because of the different nature of CPU and GPU cores. In order to solve the resource sharing problem in HCMPs, we consider efficient shared resource management schemes, in particular tackling the problem in shared last-level cache and interconnection network.
In the thesis, we propose four resource sharing mechanisms:
First, we propose an efficient cache sharing mechanism that exploits the different characteristics of CPU and GPU cores to effectively share cache space between them. Second, adaptive virtual channel partitioning for on-chip interconnection network is proposed to isolate inter-application interference. By partitioning virtual channels to CPUs and GPUs, we can prevent the interference problem while guaranteeing quality-of-service (QoS) for both cores. Third, we propose a dynamic frequency controlling mechanism to efficiently share system resources. When both cores are active, the degree of resource contention as well as the system throughput will be affected by the operating frequency of CPUs and GPUs. The proposed mechanism tries to find optimal operating frequencies for both cores, which reduces the resource contention while improving system throughput. Finally, we propose a second cache sharing mechanism that exploits GPU-semantic information. The programming and execution models of GPUs are more strict and easier than those of CPUs. Also, programmers are asked to provide more information to the hardware. By exploiting these characteristics, GPUs can energy-efficiently exercise the cache and simpler, but more efficient cache partitioning can be enabled for HCMPs.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:GATECH/oai:smartech.gatech.edu:1853/50217 |
| Date | 13 January 2014 |
| Creators | Lee, Jaekyu |
| Contributors | Kim, Hyesoon |
| Publisher | Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Source Sets | Georgia Tech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
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