Visualizing memory access in heterogeneous systems

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Elijah Ingram

Tyler Allen

What are heterogeneous systems?

• Most computers contain multiple types of processors

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• It can be beneficial to move data between different processing devices
• different devices are good at processing different things
• devices can be used as cache or secondary memory

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• Data communication between different processors is extremely slow
• speeding up data communication would provide a big increase in overall performance

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Benefits of visualizing data access

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• Creating a visualization of data movement in heterogeneous systems could provide several benefits:

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• Reveal patterns that provide insights into how to speed up data access.

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• Provide an accessible visual abstraction of data access across complex heterogeneous systems.

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What we’ve done so far

• Working on a visualization of data access during a matrix multiplication operation performed on a GPU
• Shows data movement between host and remote memory when a page fault occurs.

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• Visualization features:
• Opacity based page access history
• visual page batching
• data movement
• Viewport movement

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What still needs to be done

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• Fix bugs and complete the render loop/UI
• Allow visualization of different types and amounts of devices
• Modify how much information is presented
• Optimize performance for larger datasets
• Include an interactive way to explore the data

Thank You

Q & A