"CUDA’s Mapped Memory to Support I/O Functions on GPU" by Wei Wu, Fengbin Qi et al.

Article Title

CUDA’s Mapped Memory to Support I/O Functions on GPU

Authors

Wei Wu, Jiangnan Institute of Computing Technology, Wuxi 214083, China
Fengbin Qi, Jiangnan Institute of Computing Technology, Wuxi 214083, China
Wangquan He, Jiangnan Institute of Computing Technology, Wuxi 214083, China
Shanshan Wang, Jiangnan Institute of Computing Technology, Wuxi 214083, China

Keywords

CUDA, I/O functions, mapped memory, dynamic polling service model

Abstract

The API interfaces provided by CUDA help programmers to get high performance CUDA applications in GPU, but they cannot support most I/O operations in device codes. The characteristics of CUDA’s mapped memory are used here to create a dynamic polling service model in the host which can satisfy most I/O functions such as read/write file and "printf". The technique to implement these I/O functions has some influence on the performance of the original applications. These functions quickly respond to the users’ I/O requirements with the "printf" performance better than CUDA’s. An easy and effective real-time method is given for users to debug their programs using the I/O functions. These functions improve productivity of converting legacy C/C++ codes to CUDA and broaden CUDA’s functions.