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PPoPP 2021
Sat 27 February - Wed 3 March 2021
Tue 2 Mar 2021 10:45 - 11:00 - Session 4. Memory Management Chair(s): Naama Ben-David

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 Mar

Displayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change

10:00 - 11:00
Session 4. Memory ManagementMain Conference
Chair(s): Naama Ben-David VMware Research
10:00
15m
Talk
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
15m
Talk
Efficiently Reclaiming Memory in Concurrent Search Data Structures While Bounding Wasted Memory
Main Conference
Daniel Solomon Tel Aviv University, Adam Morrison Tel Aviv University
Link to publication
10:30
15m
Talk
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
15m
Talk
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