ZnG: Architecting GPU Multi-Processors with New Flash for Scalable Data Analysis
Published in International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), 2020
We propose ZnG, a new GPU-SSD integrated architecture, which can maximize the memory capacity in a GPU and address performance penalties imposed by an SSD. Specifically, ZnG replaces all GPU internal DRAMs with an ultra-low-latency SSD to maximize the GPU memory capacity. ZnG further removes performance bottleneck of the SSD by replacing its flash channels with a high-throughput flash network and integrating SSD firmware in the GPU’s MMU to reap the benefits of hardware accelerations. Although flash arrays within the SSD can deliver high accumulated bandwidth, only a small fraction of such bandwidth can be utilized by GPU’s memory requests due to mismatches of their access granularity. To address this, ZnG employs a large L2 cache and flash registers to buffer the memory requests. Our evaluation results indicate that ZnG can achieve 7.5x higher performance than prior work.
Recommended citation: Zhang, Jie, and Myoungsoo Jung. “ZnG: Architecting GPU Multi-Processors with New Flash for Scalable Data Analysis.” In 2020 ACM/IEEE 47th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), pp. 1064-1075. IEEE, 2020.