PTask: operating system abstractions to manage GPUs as compute devices

  • Authors:
  • Christopher J. Rossbach;Jon Currey;Mark Silberstein;Baishakhi Ray;Emmett Witchel

  • Affiliations:
  • Microsoft Research;Microsoft Research;Technion;University of Texas at Austin;University of Texas at Austin

  • Venue:
  • SOSP '11 Proceedings of the Twenty-Third ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

We propose a new set of OS abstractions to support GPUs and other accelerator devices as first class computing resources. These new abstractions, collectively called the PTask API, support a dataflow programming model. Because a PTask graph consists of OS-managed objects, the kernel has sufficient visibility and control to provide system-wide guarantees like fairness and performance isolation, and can streamline data movement in ways that are impossible under current GPU programming models. Our experience developing the PTask API, along with a gestural interface on Windows 7 and a FUSE-based encrypted file system on Linux show that the PTask API can provide important system-wide guarantees where there were previously none, and can enable significant performance improvements, for example gaining a 5× improvement in maximum throughput for the gestural interface.