Improving GPU cache hierarchy performance with a fetch and replacement cache

In the last few years, GPGPU computing has become one of the most popular computing paradigms in high-performance computers due to its excellent performance to power ratio. The memory requirements of GPGPU applications widely differ from the requirements of CPU counterparts. The amount of memory accesses is several orders of magnitude higher in GPU applications than in CPU applications, and they present disparate access patterns. Because of this fact, large and highly associative Last-Level Caches (LLCs) bring much lower performance gains in GPUs than in CPUs. This paper presents a novel approach to manage LLC misses that efficiently improves LLC hit ratio, memory-level parallelism, and miss latencies in GPU systems. The proposed approach leverages a small additional Fetch and Replacement Cache (FRC) that stores control and coherence information of incoming blocks until they are fetched from main memory. Then, fetched blocks are swapped with victim blocks to be replaced in the LLC. After that, the eviction of victim blocks is performed from the FRC. This management approach improves performance due to three main reasons: (i) the lifetime of blocks being replaced is increased, (ii) the main memory path is unclogged on long bursts of LLC misses, and (iii) the average L2 miss delaying latency is reduced. Experimental results show that our proposal increases the performance (OPC) over 25% in most of the studied applications, reaching improvements up to 150% in some applications

Efficient Management of Cache Accesses to Boost GPGPU Memory Subsystem Performance

"© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permissíon from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertisíng or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works."[EN] To support the massive amount of memory accesses that GPGPU applications generate, GPU memory hierarchies are becoming more and more complex, and the Last Level Cache (LLC) size considerably increases each GPU generation. This paper shows that counter-intuitively, enlarging the LLC brings marginal performance gains in most applications. In other words, increasing the LLC size does not scale neither in performance nor energy consumption. We examine how LLC misses are managed in typical GPUs, and we find that in most cases the way LLC misses are managed are precisely the main performance limiter. This paper proposes a novel approach that addresses this shortcoming by leveraging a tiny additional Fetch and Replacement Cache-like structure (FRC) that stores control and coherence information of the incoming blocks until they are fetched from main memory. Then, the fetched blocks are swapped with the victim blocks (i.e., selected to be replaced) in the LLC, and the eviction of such victim blocks is performed from the FRC. This approach improves performance due to three main reasons: i) the lifetime of blocks being replaced is enlarged, ii) the main memory path is unclogged on long bursts of LLC misses, and iii) the average LLC miss latency is reduced. The proposal improves the LLC hit ratio, memory-level parallelism, and reduces the miss latency compared to much larger conventional caches. Moreover, this is achieved with reduced energy consumption and with much less area requirements. Experimental results show that the proposed FRC cache scales in performance with the number of GPU compute units and the LLC size, since, depending on the FRC size, performance improves ranging from 30 to 67 percent for a modern baseline GPU card, and from 32 to 118 percent for a larger GPU. In addition, energy consumption is reduced on average from 49 to 57 percent for the larger GPU. These benefits come with a small area increase (by 7.3 percent) over the LLC baseline.This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades and the European ERDF under Grants T-PARCCA (RTI2018-098156-B-C51), and TIN2016-76635-C2-1-R (AEI/ERDF, EU), by the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia under Grant SP20190169, and by the gaZ: T58_17R research group (Aragon Gov. and European ESF).Candel-Margaix, F.; Valero Bresó, A.; Petit Martí, SV.; Sahuquillo Borrás, J. (2019). Efficient Management of Cache Accesses to Boost GPGPU Memory Subsystem Performance. IEEE Transactions on Computers. 68(10):1442-1454. https://doi.org/10.1109/TC.2019.2907591S14421454681

Orchestrating thread scheduling and cache management to improve memory system throughput in throughput processors

textThroughput processors such as GPUs continue to provide higher peak arithmetic capability. Designing a high throughput memory system to keep the computational units busy is very challenging. Future throughput processors must continue to exploit data locality and utilize the on-chip and off-chip resources in the memory system more effectively to further improve the memory system throughput. This dissertation advocates orchestrating the thread scheduler with the cache management algorithms to alleviate GPU cache thrashing and pollution, avoid bandwidth saturation and maximize GPU memory system throughput. Based on this principle, this thesis work proposes three mechanisms to improve the cache efficiency and the memory throughput. This thesis work enhances the thread throttling mechanism with the Priority-based Cache Allocation mechanism (PCAL). By estimating the cache miss ratio with a variable number of cache-feeding threads and monitoring the usage of key memory system resources, PCAL determines the number of threads to share the cache and the minimum number of threads bypassing the cache that saturate memory system resources. This approach reduces the cache thrashing problem and effectively employs chip resources that would otherwise go unused by a pure thread throttling approach. We observe 67% improvement over the original as-is benchmarks and a 18% improvement over a better-tuned warp-throttling baseline. This work proposes the AgeLRU and Dynamic-AgeLRU mechanisms to address the inter-thread cache thrashing problem. AgeLRU prioritizes cache blocks based on the scheduling priority of their fetching warp at replacement. Dynamic-AgeLRU selects the AgeLRU algorithm and the LRU algorithm adaptively to avoid degrading the performance of non-thrashing applications. There are three variants of the AgeLRU algorithm: (1) replacement-only, (2) bypassing, and (3) bypassing with traffic optimization. Compared to the LRU algorithm, the above mentioned three variants of the AgeLRU algorithm enable increases in performance of 4%, 8% and 28% respectively across a set of cache-sensitive benchmarks. This thesis work develops the Reuse-Prediction-based cache Replacement scheme (RPR) for the GPU L1 data cache to address the intra-thread cache pollution problem. By combining the GPU thread scheduling priority together with the fetching Program Counter (PC) to generate a signature as the index of the prediction table, RPR identifies and prioritizes the near-reuse blocks and high-reuse blocks to maximize the cache efficiency. Compared to the AgeLRU algorithm, the experimental results show that the RPR algorithm results in a throughput improvement of 5% on average for regular applications, and a speedup of 3.2% on average across a set of cache-sensitive benchmarks. The techniques proposed in this dissertation are able to alleviate the cache thrashing, cache pollution and resource saturation problems effectively. We believe when these techniques are combined, they will synergistically further improve GPU cache efficiency and the overall memory system throughput.Computer Science

Reducing Cache Contention On GPUs

The usage of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) as an application accelerator has become increasingly popular because, compared to traditional CPUs, they are more cost-effective, their highly parallel nature complements a CPU, and they are more energy efficient. With the popularity of GPUs, many GPU-based compute-intensive applications (a.k.a., GPGPUs) present significant performance improvement over traditional CPU-based implementations. Caches, which significantly improve CPU performance, are introduced to GPUs to further enhance application performance. However, the effect of caches is not significant for many cases in GPUs and even detrimental for some cases. The massive parallelism of the GPU execution model and the resulting memory accesses cause the GPU memory hierarchy to suffer from significant memory resource contention among threads. One cause of cache contention arises from column-strided memory access patterns that GPU applications commonly generate in many data-intensive applications. When such access patterns are mapped to hardware thread groups, they become memory-divergent instructions whose memory requests are not GPU hardware friendly, resulting in serialized access and performance degradation. Cache contention also arises from cache pollution caused by lines with low reuse. For the cache to be effective, a cached line must be reused before its eviction. Unfortunately, the streaming characteristic of GPGPU workloads and the massively parallel GPU execution model increase the reuse distance, or equivalently reduce reuse frequency of data. In a GPU, the pollution caused by a large reuse distance data is significant. Memory request stall is another contention factor. A stalled Load/Store (LDST) unit does not execute memory requests from any ready warps in the issue stage. This stall prevents the potential hit chances for the ready warps. This dissertation proposes three novel architectural modifications to reduce the contention: 1) contention-aware selective caching detects the memory-divergent instructions caused by the column-strided access patterns, calculates the contending cache sets and locality information and then selectively caches; 2) locality-aware selective caching dynamically calculates the reuse frequency with efficient hardware and caches based on the reuse frequency; and 3) memory request scheduling queues the memory requests from a warp issuing stage, frees the LDST unit stall and schedules items from the queue to the LDST unit by multiple probing of the cache. Through systematic experiments and comprehensive comparisons with existing state-of-the-art techniques, this dissertation demonstrates the effectiveness of our aforementioned techniques and the viability of reducing cache contention through architectural support. Finally, this dissertation suggests other promising opportunities for future research on GPU architecture

Near-Memory Address Translation

Memory and logic integration on the same chip is becoming increasingly cost effective, creating the opportunity to offload data-intensive functionality to processing units placed inside memory chips. The introduction of memory-side processing units (MPUs) into conventional systems faces virtual memory as the first big showstopper: without efficient hardware support for address translation MPUs have highly limited applicability. Unfortunately, conventional translation mechanisms fall short of providing fast translations as contemporary memories exceed the reach of TLBs, making expensive page walks common. In this paper, we are the first to show that the historically important flexibility to map any virtual page to any page frame is unnecessary in today's servers. We find that while limiting the associativity of the virtual-to-physical mapping incurs no penalty, it can break the translate-then-fetch serialization if combined with careful data placement in the MPU's memory, allowing for translation and data fetch to proceed independently and in parallel. We propose the Distributed Inverted Page Table (DIPTA), a near-memory structure in which the smallest memory partition keeps the translation information for its data share, ensuring that the translation completes together with the data fetch. DIPTA completely eliminates the performance overhead of translation, achieving speedups of up to 3.81x and 2.13x over conventional translation using 4KB and 1GB pages respectively.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figure

A REUSED DISTANCE BASED ANALYSIS AND OPTIMIZATION FOR GPU CACHE

As a throughput-oriented device, Graphics Processing Unit(GPU) has already integrated with cache, which is similar to CPU cores. However, the applications in GPGPU computing exhibit distinct memory access patterns. Normally, the cache, in GPU cores, suffers from threads contention and resources over-utilization, whereas few detailed works excavate the root of this phenomenon. In this work, we adequately analyze the memory accesses from twenty benchmarks based on reuse distance theory and quantify their patterns. Additionally, we discuss the optimization suggestions, and implement a Bypassing Aware(BA) Cache which could intellectually bypass the thrashing-prone candidates. BA cache is a cost efficient cache design with two extra bits in each line, they are flags to make the bypassing decision and find the victim cache line. Experimental results show that BA cache can improve the system performance around 20\% and reduce the cache miss rate around 11\% compared with traditional design

A Survey of Techniques for Architecting TLBs

“Translation lookaside buffer” (TLB) caches virtual to physical address translation information and is used in systems ranging from embedded devices to high-end servers. Since TLB is accessed very frequently and a TLB miss is extremely costly, prudent management of TLB is important for improving performance and energy efficiency of processors. In this paper, we present a survey of techniques for architecting and managing TLBs. We characterize the techniques across several dimensions to highlight their similarities and distinctions. We believe that this paper will be useful for chip designers, computer architects and system engineers