A Survey of Techniques for Managing and Leveraging Caches in GPUs

International audienceInitially introduced as special-purpose accelerators for graphics applications, GPUs have now emerged as general purpose computing platforms for a wide range of applications. To address the requirements of these applications, modern GPUs include sizable hardware-managed caches. However, several factors, such as unique architecture of GPU, rise of CPU-GPU heterogeneous computing etc., demand effective management of caches to achieve high performance and energy efficiency. Recently, several techniques have been proposed for this purpose. In this paper, we survey several architectural and system-level techniques proposed for managing and leveraging GPU caches. We also discuss the importance and challenges of cache management in GPUs. The aim of this paper is to provide the readers insights into cache management techniques for GPUs and motivate them to propose even better techniques for leveraging the full potential of caches in the GPUs of tomorrow