A Simple Cache Coherence Scheme for Integrated CPU-GPU Systems

This paper presents a novel approach to accelerate applications running on integrated CPU-GPU systems. Many integrated CPU-GPU systems use cache-coherent shared memory to communicate. For example, after CPU produces data for GPU, the GPU may pull the data into its cache when it accesses the data. In such a pull-based approach, data resides in a shared cache until the GPU accesses it, resulting in long load latency on a first GPU access to a cache line. In this work, we propose a new, push-based, coherence mechanism that explicitly exploits the CPU and GPU producer-consumer relationship by automatically moving data from CPU to GPU last-level cache. The proposed mechanism results in a dramatic reduction of the GPU L2 cache miss rate in general, and a consequent increase in overall performance. Our experiments show that the proposed scheme can increase performance by up to 37%, with typical improvements in the 5–7% range. We find that even when tested applications do not benefit from the proposed approach, their performance does not decrease with our technique. While we demonstrate how the proposed scheme can co-exist with traditional cache coherence mechanisms, we argue that it could also be used as a simpler replacement for existing protocols.