Are Dynamic Memory Managers on GPUs Slow? A Survey and Benchmarks
Dynamic memory management on GPUs is generally understood to be a challenging topic. On current GPUs, hundreds of thousands of threads might concurrently allocate new memory or free previously allocated memory. This leads to problems with thread contention, synchronization overhead and fragmentation. Various approaches have been proposed in the last ten years and we set out to evaluate them on a level playing field on modern hardware to answer the question, if dynamic memory managers are as slow as commonly thought of. In this survey paper, we provide a consistent framework to evaluate all publicly available memory managers in a large set of scenarios. We summarize each approach and thoroughly evaluate allocation performance (thread-based as well as warp-based), and look at performance scaling, fragmentation and real-world performance considering a synthetic workload as well as initializing and updating dynamic graphs. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and provide guidelines for the respective best usage scenario. We provide a unified interface to integrate any of the tested memory managers into an application and switch between them for benchmarking purposes. Given our results, we can dispel some of the dread associated with dynamic memory managers on the GPU.
Tue 2 MarDisplayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change
10:00 - 11:00 | |||
10:00 15mTalk | NBR: Neutralization Based Reclamation Main Conference Ajay Singh University of Waterloo, Trevor Brown University of Waterloo, Ali Mashtizadeh University of Waterloo Link to publication | ||
10:15 15mTalk | Efficiently Reclaiming Memory in Concurrent Search Data Structures While Bounding Wasted Memory Main Conference Link to publication | ||
10:30 15mTalk | OrcGC: Automatic Lock-Free Memory Reclamation Main Conference Andreia Correia University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, Pedro Ramalhete Cisco Systems, Pascal Felber University of Neuchâtel Link to publication | ||
10:45 15mTalk | Are Dynamic Memory Managers on GPUs Slow? A Survey and Benchmarks Main Conference Martin Winter Graz University of Technology, Mathias Parger Graz University of Technology, Daniel Mlakar Graz University of Technology, Markus Steinberger Graz University of Technology Link to publication |