research-article

Heterogeneous-race-free memory models

Authors:

Derek R. Hower,

Blake A. Hechtman,

Bradford M. Beckmann,

Benedict R. Gaster,

Steven K. Reinhardt,

David A. WoodAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 49, Issue 4

Pages 427 - 440

https://doi.org/10.1145/2644865.2541981

Published: 24 February 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Commodity heterogeneous systems (e.g., integrated CPUs and GPUs), now support a unified, shared memory address space for all components. Because the latency of global communication in a heterogeneous system can be prohibi-tively high, heterogeneous systems (unlike homogeneous CPU systems) provide synchronization mechanisms that only guarantee ordering among a subset of threads, which we call a scope. Unfortunately, the consequences and se-mantics of these scoped operations are not yet well under-stood. Without a formal and approachable model to reason about the behavior of these operations, we risk an array of portability and performance issues.

In this paper, we embrace scoped synchronization with a new class of memory consistency models that add scoped synchronization to data-race-free models like those of C++ and Java. Called sequential consistency for heterogeneous-race-free (SC for HRF), the new models guarantee SC for programs with "sufficient" synchronization (no data races) of "sufficient" scope. We discuss two such models. The first, HRF-direct, works well for programs with highly regular parallelism. The second, HRF-indirect, builds on HRF-direct by allowing synchronization using different scopes in some cases involving transitive communication. We quanti-tatively show that HRF-indirect encourages forward-looking programs with irregular parallelism by showing up to a 10% performance increase in a task runtime for GPUs.

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https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-803738-6.00003-3
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Heterogeneous-race-free memory models

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 49, Issue 4

ASPLOS '14

April 2014

729 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/2644865

Editors:
Mark W. Bailey
Hamilton College, Clinton, NY
,
Rajeev Balasubramonian
University of Utah
,
Al Davis
University of Utah
,
Sarita Adve
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champ

Issue’s Table of Contents

ASPLOS '14: Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
February 2014
780 pages
ISBN:9781450323055
DOI:10.1145/2541940
General Chairs:
Rajeev Balasubramonian
University of Utah
,
Al Davis
University of Utah
,
Program Chair:
Sarita Adve
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champ

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 24 February 2014

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 49, Issue 4

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Cited By

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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpdc.2023.104836
Liu HHuang HDan TDahlia M(2019)SIMD-XProceedings of the 2019 USENIX Conference on Usenix Annual Technical Conference10.5555/3358807.3358843(411-427)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3358807.3358843
Ta TTroendle DJang B(2017)Thread communication and synchronization on massively parallel GPUsAdvances in GPU Research and Practice10.1016/B978-0-12-803738-6.00003-3(57-81)Online publication date: 2017
https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-803738-6.00003-3
Puthoor SLipasti M(2023)Turn-based Spatiotemporal Coherence for GPUsACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization10.1145/359305420:3(1-27)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3593054
Levine RGuo TCho MBaker ALevien RNeto DQuinn ASorensen TAamodt TJerger NSwift M(2023)MC Mutants: Evaluating and Improving Testing for Memory Consistency SpecificationsProceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 210.1145/3575693.3575750(473-488)Online publication date: 27-Jan-2023
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Dalmia PMahapatra RIntan JNegrut DSinclair M(2023)Improving the Scalability of GPU Synchronization PrimitivesIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2022.321850834:1(275-290)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TPDS.2022.3218508
Singh SFeliu JAcacio MJimborean ARos A(2023)CELLO: Compiler-Assisted Efficient Load-Load Ordering in Data-Race-Free Regions2023 32nd International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT)10.1109/PACT58117.2023.00009(1-13)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2023
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Jeon H(2023)GPU ArchitectureHandbook of Computer Architecture10.1007/978-981-15-6401-7_66-2(1-29)Online publication date: 25-Jun-2023
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