• The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.87-92
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• 2020

Although GPGPU (General-Purpose GPU) can maximize performance by parallelizing a task with tens of thousands of threads, those threads are internally grouped into a thread block, which is a base unit for processing and resource allocation. A thread block scheduler is a specialized hardware gadget whose role is to allocate thread blocks to GPGPU processing hardware in a round-robin manner. However, round-robin is a sequential allocation policy and is not optimized for GPGPU resource utilization. In this paper, we propose a thread block scheduler model which can analyze and quantify performances for various thread block scheduling policies. Experiment results from the implemented simulator of our model show that the legacy hardware thread block scheduling does not behave well when workload becomes heavy.

• The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.71-76
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• 2022

Round-robin is widely used for the scheduling of large-scale parallel workloads in the computing units of GPGPU. Round-robin is easy to implement by sequentially allocating tasks to each computing unit, but the load balance between computing units is not well achieved in multi-workload environments like cloud. In this paper, we propose a new thread block scheduling policy to resolve this situation. The proposed policy manages thread blocks generated by various GPGPU workloads with multiple queues based on their computation loads and tries to maximize the resource utilization of each computing unit by selecting a thread block from the queue that can maximally utilize the remaining resources, thereby inducing load balance between computing units. Through simulation experiments under various load environments, we show that the proposed policy improves the GPGPU performance by 24.8% on average compared to Round-robin.

• KIPS Transactions on Computer and Communication Systems
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• v.6 no.5
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• pp.219-230
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• 2017

General-Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs) build massively parallel architecture and apply multithreading technology to explore parallelism. By using programming models like CUDA, and OpenCL, GPGPUs are becoming the best in exploiting plentiful thread-level parallelism caused by parallel applications. Unfortunately, modern GPGPU cannot efficiently utilize its available hardware resources for numerous general-purpose applications. One of the primary reasons is the inefficiency of existing warp/thread block schedulers in hiding long latency instructions, resulting in lost opportunity to improve the performance. This paper studies the effects of hardware thread scheduling policy on GPGPU performance. We propose a novel warp scheduling policy that can alleviate the drawbacks of the traditional round-robin policy. The proposed warp scheduler first classifies the warps of a thread block into two groups, warps with long latency and warps with short latency and then schedules the warps with long latency before the warps with short latency. Furthermore, to support the proposed warp scheduler, we also propose a supplemental technique that can dynamically reduce the number of streaming multiprocessors to which will be assigned thread blocks when encountering a high contention degree at the memory and interconnection network. Based on our experiments on a 15-streaming multiprocessor GPGPU platform, the proposed warp scheduling policy provides an average IPC improvement of 7.5% over the baseline round-robin warp scheduling policy. This paper also shows that the GPGPU performance can be improved by approximately 8.9% on average when the two proposed techniques are combined.

• The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.49-54
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• 2022

With the recent widespread adoption of general-purpose GPUs (GPGPUs) in cloud systems, maximizing the resource utilization through multitasking in GPGPU has become an important issue. In this article, we show that resource allocation based on the workload classification of computing-bound and memory-bound is not sufficient with respect to resource utilization, and present a new thread block scheduling policy for GPGPU that makes use of fine-grained resource utilizations of each workload. Unlike previous approaches, the proposed policy reduces scheduling overhead by separating profiling and scheduling, and maximizes resource utilizations by co-locating workloads with different bottleneck resources. Through simulations under various virtual machine scenarios, we show that the proposed policy improves the GPGPU throughput by 130.6% on average and up to 161.4%.