DynaSOAr: A Parallel Memory Allocator for Object-oriented Programming on GPUs with Efficient Memory Access

Object-oriented programming has long been regarded as too inefficient for SIMD high-performance computing, despite the fact that many important HPC applications have an inherent object structure. On SIMD accelerators, including GPUs, this is mainly due to performance problems with memory allocation and memory access: There are a few libraries that support parallel memory allocation directly on accelerator devices, but all of them suffer from uncoalesed memory accesses. We discovered a broad class of object-oriented programs with many important real-world applications that can be implemented efficiently on massively parallel SIMD accelerators. We call this class Single-Method Multiple-Objects (SMMO), because parallelism is expressed by running a method on all objects of a type. To make fast GPU programming available to average programmers, we developed DynaSOAr, a CUDA framework for SMMO applications. DynaSOAr consists of (1) a fully-parallel, lock-free, dynamic memory allocator, (2) a data layout DSL and (3) an efficient, parallel do-all operation. DynaSOAr achieves performance superior to state-of-the-art GPU memory allocators by controlling both memory allocation and memory access. DynaSOAr improves the usage of allocated memory with a Structure of Arrays data layout and achieves low memory fragmentation through efficient management of free and allocated memory blocks with lock-free, hierarchical bitmaps. Contrary to other allocators, our design is heavily based on atomic operations, trading raw (de)allocation performance for better overall application performance. In our benchmarks, DynaSOAr achieves a speedup of application code of up to 3x over state-of-the-art allocators. Moreover, DynaSOAr manages heap memory more efficiently than other allocators, allowing programmers to run up to 2x larger problem sizes with the same amount of memory.