Designing GPU Data Structures for Efficient Memory Oversubscription

Efficient concurrent data structures are important building blocks for accelerating applications on GPUs. With the ever-increasing memory footprint of GPU workloads, data structures used by kernels can exceed global memory capacity. Using the unified virtual memory (UVM) model is a popular approach for kernels to oversubscribe GPU memory without the need for explicit memory management by a programmer. However, we show that data structures executing with UVM can suffer from performance degradation due to the high overheads associated with data migration and thrashing for irregular access patterns.

In this paper, we propose two-level hierarchical designs for hash table and skip list data structures that aim to maximize access locality and handle use cases where the data structure oversubscribes GPU memory. The outer-level container enables efficient jumps to desired regions of the data structure, while the inner container allows operating on the data. The inner container is sized to facilitate efficient data transfers between the CPU and the GPU. Experimental results on a diverse set of input operation sequences show that our data structure designs substantially improve performance over optimized UVM baselines while supporting high degrees of GPU memory oversubscription. Importantly, our proposed design, when used to implement key-value stores in metagenomics classification and k-mer counting applications, achieves a geomean speedup of 2.06× for hash table and 2.37× for skip list over baseline UVM implementations. CCS Concepts: • Computing methodologies → Concurrent algorithms; Massively parallel algorithms; Graphics processors; • Theory of computation → Data structures design and analysis.