Toward OS-Level and Device-Level Cooperative Scheduling for Multitasking GPUs

Abstract

As one of the most popular accelerators, the graphics processing unit (GPU) has been extensively adopted throughout the world. With the burst of new applications and the growing scale of data, co-running applications on limited GPU resources has become increasingly important due to its dramatic improvement in overall system efficiency. Quality of service (QoS) support among concurrent generalpurpose GPU (GPGPU) applications is currently one of the most trending research topics. Prior efforts have been focused on providing QoS support either with OS-level or device-level scheduling methods. Each of these scheduling methods possesses pros and cons and may be unable to independently cover all the scheduling cases. In this paper, we propose a cooperative QoS scheduling scheme (C-QoS) that consists of operating-system-level (OS-level) scheduling and device-level scheduling. Our proposed scheme can control the progress of a kernel and provide thorough QoS support for concurrent applications in multitasking GPUs. Due to the accurate resource management of the copy engine and execution engine, C-QoS achieves QoS goals 23.33% more often than state-of-the-art QoS support mechanisms. The results demonstrate that cooperative methods achieve 17.27% higher system utilization than uncooperative methods. INDEX TERMS Multitasking, parallel architectures, quality of service.