EffiSha: A Software Framework for Enabling Efficient Preemptive Scheduling of GPU

Abstract

Modern GPUs are broadly adopted in many multitasking environments, including data centers and smartphones. However, the current support for the scheduling of multiple GPU kernels (from different applications) is limited, forming a major barrier for GPU to meet many practical needs. This work for the first time demonstrates that on existing GPUs, efficient preemptive scheduling of GPU kernels is possible even without special hardware support. Specifically, it presents EffiSha, a pure software framework that enables preemptive scheduling of GPU kernels with very low overhead. The enabled preemptive scheduler offers flexible support of kernels of different priorities, and demonstrates significant potential for reducing the average turnaround time and improving the system overall throughput of programs that time share a modern GPU.