Protecting Real-Time GPU Applications on Integrated CPU-GPU SoC Platforms

Integrated CPU-GPU architecture provides excellent acceleration capabilities for data parallel applications on embedded platforms while meeting the size, weight and power (SWaP) requirements. However, sharing of main memory between CPU applications and GPU kernels can severely affect the execution of GPU kernels and diminish the performance gain provided by GPU. For example, in the NVIDIA Jetson TX2 platform, an integrated CPU-GPU architecture, we observed that, in the worst case, the GPU kernels can suffer as much as 3X slowdown in the presence of co-running memory intensive CPU applications. In this paper, we propose a software mechanism, which we call BWLOCK++, to protect the performance of GPU kernels from co-scheduled memory intensive CPU applications.