I am running on a very strange issue with the Cuda Runtime API. Calls to functions like cudaMallocHost(), cudaEventCreate(), cudaFree() etc.. seem to be executed only when kernels finish execution on GPU. This kernels are all launched on a stream created with the cudaStreamNonBlocking flag. What is the problem? Do I have to put up some other flags somewhere?
They could be made asynchronous, but it wouldn't be surprising if they are not.
With respect to cudaMallocHost(), which requires that the host memory be mapped for the GPU: if the allocation can't be satisfied from a preallocated pool, the GPU's page tables must be edited. It would not surprise me in the least if the driver had a restriction where it could not edit the page tables of an executing kernel. (Esp. since the page table editing must be done by kernel mode driver code.)
With respect to cudaEventCreate(), that really should be asynchronous since those allocations generally can be satisfied from a preallocated pool. The main impediment there is that changing the behavior would break existing applications that rely on its current, synchronous behavior.
Freeing objects asynchronously requires the driver to track which objects are referenced in the command buffers submitted to the GPU, and defer the actual free operation until after the GPU has finished processing them. It is doable but I am not sure NVIDIA has done the work.
For cudaFree(), it is not possible to track references as you could for CUDA events (because pointers can be stored for running kernels to read and chase). So for large vitrual address ranges that should be deallocated and unmapped, the free must be deferred until after all pending GPU operations have executed. Again, doable but I am not sure NVIDIA has done the work.
I think NVIDIA generally expects developers to work around the lack of asynchrony in these entry points.
Related
I have a CUDA kernel that I want to run across multiple GPUs. On each GPU, it's performing a search task, so I'd like to launch it on each GPU and then in the host code wait until any of the GPUs returns (indicating that it found what it was looking for).
I know about cudaDeviceSynchronize(), but that blocks until the current GPU is finished. Is there anything that will let me block until any one of N different GPUs finishes?
CUDA doesn't provide any built-in functions to accomplish that directly.
I believe you would need to do something via polling, and then if you want to poll the results, you can. If you want to build something that blocks the CPU thread, I guess a spin on the polling operation would do it. (cudaDeviceSynchronize() is by default a spin operation under the hood)
You could build a polling system using various ideas:
cudaEvent - launch an event after each kernel launch, then use cudaEventQuery() operations to poll
cudaHostAlloc - use host-pinned memory that each kernel can update with status - read the memory directly
cudaLaunchHostFunc - put a callback in place after each kernel launch. The callback host function would update ordinary host memory, which you could poll for status.
The callback method (at least) would allow you (perhaps via atomics) to collapse the polling to a single memory location, if that were important for some reason. You could probably implement something similar using the host-pinned memory method for systems that have CUDA system atomic support.
Is there a way to synchronize two different CUDA applications on the same GPU?
I have two different part of processes: original process & post processing. Original process is using GPU. And now we're going to migrate post processing to GPU also. In our architecture there is a requirement, that this two processes should be organized as two separate applications.
And now I'm thinking of synchronization problem:
if I synchronize them on CPU level, I have to know outside when GPU of 1 app is over.
ideal way as I see is to synchronize them somehow on GPU level.
Is there some flag for that purpose? Or some workaround?
Is there a way to synchronize two different CUDA applications on the same GPU?
In a word, no. You would have to do this via some sort of inter-process communication mechanism on the host side.
If you are on Linux or on Windows with a GPU in TCC mode, host IPC will still be required, but you can "interlock" CUDA activity in one process to CUDA activity in another process using the CUDA IPC mechanism. In particular, it is possible to communicate an event handle to another process, using cudaIpcGetEventHandle, and cudaIpcOpenEventHandle. This would provide an event that you could use for a cudaStreamWaitEvent call. Of course, this is really only half of the solution. You would also need to have CUDA IPC memory handles. The CUDA simpleIPC sample code has most of the plumbing you need.
You should also keep in mind that CUDA cannot be used in a child process if CUDA has been initialized in a parent process. This concept is also already provided for in the sample code.
So you would do something like this:
Process A:
create (cudaMalloc) allocation for buffer to hold results to send to post-process
create event for synchronization
get cuda IPC memory and event handles
using host-based IPC, communicate these handles to process B
launch processing work (i.e. GPU kernel) on the data, results should be put in the buffer created above
into the same stream as the GPU kernel, record the event
signal to process B via host based IPC, to launch work
Process B:
receive memory and event handles from process A using host IPC
extract memory pointer and create IPC event from the handles
create a stream for work issue
wait for signal from process A (indicates event has been recorded)
perform cudaStreamWaitEvent using the local event and created stream
in that same stream, launch the post-processing kernel
This should allow the post-processing kernel to begin only when kernel from process A is complete, using the event interlock. Another caveat with this is that you cannot allow process A to terminate at any time during this. Since it is the owner of the memory and event, it must continue to run as long as that memory or that event is required, even if required in another process. If that is a concern, it might make sense to make process B the "owner" and communicate the handles to process A.
CUDA implicitly initialises when the first CUDA runtime function is called.
I'm timing the runtime of my code and repeating 100 times via a loop (for([100 times]) {[Time CUDA code and log]}), which also needs to take into account the initialisation time for CUDA at each iteration. Thus I need to uninitialise CUDA after every iteration - how to do this?
I've tried using cudaDeviceReset(), but seems not to have uninitialised CUDA.
Many thanks.
cudaDeviceReset is the canonical way to destroy a context in the runtime API (and calling cudaFree(0) is the canonical way to create a context). Those are the only levels of "re-initialization" available to a running process. There are other per-process events which happen when a process loads the CUDA driver and runtime libraries and connects to the kernel driver, but there is no way I am aware of to make those happen programatically short of forking a new process.
But I really doubt you want or should be needing to account for this sort of setup time when calculating performance metrics anyway.
Has anyone successfully run 2 different kernels in 2 different CUDA streams and gotten them to synchronize? Basically I want to have 1 kernel A send data to another concurrently running kernel B (in a different stream), then get results back. The reason: kernel A is running in 1 CUDA thread and I want a multiple GPU thread implementation for kernel B.
This is with high end GPUs (Fermi/Tesla), CUDA 4.2
Same GPU, different streams. So the data should be able to be communicated thru device memory, but how to sync them?
The CUDA Programming Model only supports communication between threads in the same thread block (CUDA C Programming Guide at the end of section 2.2 Thread Hierarchy). This cannot be reliably implemented through the current CUDA API. If you try you may find partial success. However, this will fail on different OSes, different executions of your application, and this will be broken by future driver updates and new hardware (GK110 supports enhanced concurrency model).
If I correctly caught your question, you have two problems:
Inter-Kernel data exchange
Inter-Kernel synchronization
1) Inter-Kernel Data Exchange can be achieved through sharing data in global device memory.
2) As I know, there is no reliable facilities for inter-kernel synchronization provided by CUDA. And I'm unaware about any suitable trick that can be applied here.
CUDA C Programming Gide v7.5 tells us:
"Applications manage the concurrent operations described above through streams. A stream is a sequence of commands (possibly issued by different host threads) that execute in order. Different streams, on the other hand, may execute their commands out of order with respect to one another or concurrently; this behavior is not guaranteed and should therefore not be relied upon for correctness (e.g., inter-kernel communication is undefined)."
You will need to synchronize on the host. From the top of my head, calling cudaDeviceSynchronize for every stream in turn should do the trick but it may not be that easy.
Your data must be in global memory
You need to get the data address on the host
You must send this data back to the second kernel
your code must be something similar to this:
*dataToExchange_h,*dataToExchange_d;
cudaMalloc((void**)dataToExchange, sizeof(data));
kernel1<<< M1,N1,0,stream1>>>(dataToExchange);
cudaStreamSynchronize(stream1);
kernel2<<< M2,N2,0,stream2>>>(dataToExchange);
But note that stream synchronization slow down the process, so you should avoid it as much as possible.
You can also get stream synchronization through cuda events, it less obvious and does not give special advantage, but it's useful to know it ;-)
I have allocated memory on device using cudaMalloc and have passed it to a kernel function. Is it possible to access that memory from host before the kernel finishes its execution?
The only way I can think of to get a memcpy to kick off while the kernel is still executing is by submitting an asynchronous memcpy in a different stream than the kernel. (If you use the default APIs for either kernel launch or asynchronous memcpy, the NULL stream will force the two operations to be serialized.)
But because there is no way to synchronize a kernel's execution with a stream, that code would be subject to a race condition. i.e. the copy engine might pull from memory that hasn't yet been written by the kernel.
The person who alluded to mapped pinned memory is into something: if the kernel writes to mapped pinned memory, it is effectively "copying" data to host memory as it finishes processing it. This idiom works nicely, provided the kernel will not be touching the data again.
It is possible, but there's no guarantee as to the contents of the memory you retrieve in such a way, since you don't know what the progress of the kernel is.
What you're trying to achieve is to overlap data transfer and execution. That is possible through the use of streams. You create multiple CUDA streams, and queue a kernel execution and a device-to-host cudaMemcpy in each stream. For example, put the kernel that fills the location "0" and cudaMemcpy from that location back to host into stream 0, kernel that fills the location "1" and cudaMemcpy from "1" into stream 1, etc. What will happen then is that the GPU will overlap copying from "0" and executing "1".
Check CUDA documentation, it's documented somewhere (in the best practices guide, I think).
You can't access GPU memory directly from the host regardless of a kernel is running or not.
If you're talking about copying that memory back to the host before the kernel is finished writing to it, then the answer depends on the compute capability of your device. But all but the very oldest chips can perform data transfers while the kernel is running.
It seems unlikely that you would want to copy memory that is still being updated by a kernel though. You would get some random snapshot of partially finished data. Instead, you might want to set up something where you have two buffers on the device. You can copy one of the buffers while the GPU is working on the other.
Update:
Based on your clarification, I think the closest you can get is using mapped page-locked host memory, also called zero-copy memory. With this approach, values are copied to the host as they are written by the kernel. There is no way to query the kernel to see how much of the work it has performed, so I think you would have to repeatedly scan the memory for newly written values. See section 3.2.4.3, Mapped Memory, in the CUDA Programming Guide v4.2 for a bit more information.
I wouldn't recommend this though. Unless you have some very unusual requirements, there is likely to be a better way to accomplish your task.
When you launch the Kernel it is an asynchronous (non blocking) call. Calling cudaMemcpy next will block until the Kernel has finished.
If you want to have the result for Debug purposes maybe it is possible for you to use cudaDebugging where you can step through the kernel and inspect the memory.
For small result checks you could also use printf() in the Kernel code.
Or run only a threadblock of size (1,1) if you are interested in that specific result.