Efficient exception handling support for GPUs

Operating systems have long relied on the exception handling mechanism to implement numerous virtual memory features and optimizations. However, today's GPUs have a limited support for exceptions, which prevents implementation of such techniques. The existing solution forwards GPU memory faults to the CPU while the faulting instruction is stalled in the GPU pipeline. This approach prevents preemption of the faulting threads, and results in underutilized hardware resources while the page fault is being resolved by the CPU. In this paper, we present three schemes for supporting GPU exceptions that allow the system software to preempt and restart the execution of the faulting code. There is a trade-off between the performance overhead introduced by adding exception support and the additional complexity. Our solutions range from 90% of the baseline performance with no area overheads, to 99.2% of the baseline performance with less than 1% area and 2% power overheads. Experimental results also show 10% performance improvement on some benchmarks when using this support to context switch the GPU during page migrations, to hide their latency. We further observe up to 1.75x average speedup when implementing lazy memory allocation on the GPU, also possible thanks to our exception handling support.
We would like to thank anonymous reviewers, Lluis Vilanova and Javier Cabezas for their help in improving this paper. Early discussions with Steve Keckler, Arslan Zulfiqar, Jack Choquette and Olivier Giroux had a major influence on this work, for which we are very grateful. This work is supported by Nvidia through the GPU Center of Excellence program, the Spanish Government through Programa Severo Ochoa (SEV-2015-0493), the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology (TIN2015-65316-P) and by the Generalitat de Catalunya (grants 2014-SGR-1051 and 2014-SGR-1272). Nacho Navarro passed away before this paper was published. This work would have not been possible without his guidance, support, and dedication. A memory of him will always live in his students, colleagues and loved ones.
Peer Reviewed
Postprint (published version)