HiWayLib: A Software Framework for Enabling High Performance Communications for Heterogeneous Pipeline Computations

Pipeline is a parallel computing model underpinning a class of important applications running on CPU-GPU heterogeneous systems. A critical aspect for the efficiency of such applications is the support of communications among pipeline stages that may reside on CPU and different parts of a GPU. Existing libraries of concurrent data structures do not meet the needs, due to the massive parallelism on GPU and the complexities in CPU-GPU memory and connections. This work gives an in-depth study on the communication problem. It identifies three key issues, namely, slow and errorprone detection of the end of pipeline processing, intensive queue contentions on GPU, and cumbersome inter-device data movements. This work offers solutions to each of the issues, and integrates all together to form a unified library named HiWayLib. Experiments show that HiWayLib significantly boosts the efficiency of pipeline communications in CPU-GPU heterogeneous applications. For real-world applications, HiWayLib produces 1.22-2.13× speedups over the state-of-art implementations with little extra programming effort required.