high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

Today, it is possible to associate multiple CPUs and multiple GPUs in a single shared memory architecture. Using these resources efficiently in a seamless way is a challenging issue. In this paper, we propose a parallelization scheme for dynamically balancing work load between multiple CPUs and GPUs. Most tasks have a CPU and GPU implementation, so they can be executed on any processing unit. We rely on a two level scheduling associating a traditional task graph partitioning and a work stealing guided by processor affinity and heterogeneity. These criteria are intended to limit inefficient task migrations between GPUs, the cost of memory transfers being high, and to favor mapping small tasks on CPUs and large ones on GPUs to take advantage of heterogeneity. This scheme has been implemented to support the SOFA physics simulation engine. Experiments show that we can reach speedups of 22 with 4 GPUs and 29 with 4 CPU cores and 4 GPUs. CPUs unload GPUs from small tasks making these GPUs more efficient, leading to a “cooperative speedup” greater than the sum of the speedups separatly obtained on 4 GPUs and 4 CPUs.