2020 53rd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO) Deterministic Atomic Buffering Yuan Hsi Chou∗¶, Christopher Ng∗¶, Shaylin Cattell∗, Jeremy Intan†, Matthew D. Sinclair†, Joseph Devietti‡, Timothy G. Rogers§ and Tor M. Aamodt∗ ∗University of British Columbia, †University of Wisconsin, ‡University of Pennsylvania, §Purdue University AMD Research {yuanhsi, chris.ng}@ece.ubc.ca,
[email protected], {intan, sinclair}@cs.wisc.edu,
[email protected],
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[email protected] ¶equal contribution Abstract—Deterministic execution for GPUs is a desirable property as it helps with debuggability and reproducibility. It is also important for safety regulations, as safety critical workloads are starting to be deployed onto GPUs. Prior deterministic archi- tectures, such as GPUDet, attempt to provide strong determinism for all types of workloads, incurring significant performance overheads due to the many restrictions that are required to satisfy determinism. We observe that a class of reduction workloads, such as graph applications and neural architecture search for machine Fig. 1: Simplified non-deterministic reduction example: Base- learning, do not require such severe restrictions to preserve 10, 3-digit precision, rounding up (details in Section III-B). determinism. This motivates the design of our system, Deter- ministic Atomic Buffering (DAB), which provides deterministic execution with low area and performance overheads by focusing such as autonomous agents and medical diagnostics, require solely on ordering atomic instructions instead of all memory reproducibility to ensure that systems meet specifications or instructions. By scheduling atomic instructions deterministically that experimental results can be replicated for verification [7], with atomic buffering, the results of atomic operations are [8].