Communications of the ACM
GPUfs: The Case For Operating System Services on GPUs
Credit: Kudryashka
Due to their impressive price/performance and performance/watt curves, GPUs have become the processor of choice for many types of intensively parallel computations, from data mining to molecular dynamics simulations.14 As GPUs have matured and acquired increasingly general-purpose processing capabilities, a richer and more powerful set of languages, tools, and computational algorithms have evolved to make use of GPU hardware. Unfortunately, GPU programming models are still almost entirely lacking in core system abstractions (such as files and network sockets) CPU programmers have taken for granted for decades. Today's GPU is capable of amazing computational feats when fed the right data and managed by application code on the host CPU but incapable of initiating basic system interactions for itself (such as reading an input file from a disk). Because core system abstractions are unavailable to GPU code, GPU programmers face many of the same challenges CPU application developers did a half-century ago, particularly the constant reimplementation of system abstractions (such as data movement and management operations).
Key Insights
The time has come to provide GPU programs the useful system services CPU code already enjoys. This goal emerges from a broader trend toward integrating GPUs more cleanly with operating systems, as exemplified by work to support pipeline composition of GPU tasks16 and improve the operating system's management of GPU resources.4 Here, we focus on making core operating system abstractions available to GPU code and explain the lessons we learned building GPUfs,19,20 our prototype file system layer for GPU software.
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