A server-based approach for predictable GPU access control

We propose a server-based approach to manage a general-purpose graphics processing unit (GPU) in a predictable and efficient manner. Our proposed approach introduces a GPU server task that is dedicated to handling GPU requests from other tasks on their behalf. The GPU server ensures bounded time to access the GPU, and allows other tasks to suspend during their GPU computation to save CPU cycles. By doing so, we address the two major limitations of the existing real-time synchronization-based GPU management approach: busy waiting and long priority inversion. We implemented a prototype of the server-based approach on a real embedded platform. This case study demonstrates the practicality and effectiveness of the server-based approach. Experimental results indicate that the server-based approach yields significant improvements in task schedulability over the existing synchronization-based approach in most practical settings. Although we focus on a GPU in this paper, the server-based approach can also be used for other types of computational accelerators.