PTask

Christopher J. Rossbach, Jon Currey, Mark Silberstein, Baishakhi Ray, Emmett Witchel
2011 Proceedings of the Twenty-Third ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles - SOSP '11  
We propose a new set of OS abstractions to support GPUs and other accelerator devices as first class computing resources. These new abstractions, collectively called the PTask API, support a dataflow programming model. Because a PTask graph consists of OS-managed objects, the kernel has sufficient visibility and control to provide system-wide guarantees like fairness and performance isolation, and can streamline data movement in ways that are impossible under current GPU programming models. Our
more » ... experience developing the PTask API, along with a gestural interface on Windows 7 and a FUSE-based encrypted file system on Linux show that the PTask API can provide important systemwide guarantees where there were previously none, and can enable significant performance improvements, for example gaining a 5× improvement in maximum throughput for the gestural interface.
doi:10.1145/2043556.2043579 dblp:conf/sosp/RossbachCSRW11 fatcat:5cgrgj5h5ff6xapt6h7bebqikq