Operating Systems Challenges for GPU Resource Management

The graphics processing unit (GPU) is becoming a very powerful platform to accelerate graphics and data-parallel compute-intensive applications. It significantly outperforms traditional multi-core processors in performance and energy efficiency. Its application domains also range widely from embedded systems to high-performance computing systems. However, operating systems support is not adequate, lacking models, designs, and implementation efforts of GPU resource management for multi-tasking environments. This paper identifies a GPU resource management model to provide a basis for operating systems research using GPU technology. In particular, we present design concepts for GPU resource management. A list of operating systems challenges is also provided to highlight future directions of this research domain, including specific ideas of GPU scheduling for real-time systems. Our preliminary evaluation demonstrates that the performance of open-source software is competitive with that of proprietary software, and hence operating systems re-search can start investigating GPU resource management.