DUCATI: High-performance Address Translation by Extending TLB Reach of GPU-accelerated Systems

Conventional on-chip TLB hierarchies are unable to fully cover the growing application working-set sizes.

To make things worse, Last-Level TLB (LLT) misses require multiple accesses to the page table even with

the use of page walk caches. Consequently, LLT misses incur long address translation latency and hurt

performance. This paper proposes two low-overhead hardware mechanisms for reducing the frequency and

penalty of on-die LLT misses. The first, Unified CAche and TLB (UCAT), enables the conventional on-die

Last-Level Cache (LLC) to store cache lines and TLB entries in a single unified structure and increases ondie

TLB capacity significantly. The second, DRAM-TLB, memoizes virtual to physical address translations

in DRAM and reduces LLT miss penalty when UCAT is unable to fully cover total application working-set.

DRAM-TLB serves as the next larger level in the TLB hierarchy that significantly increases TLB coverage

relative to on-chip TLBs. The combination of these two mechanisms, DUCATI, is an address translation

architecture that improves GPU performance by 81% (up to 4.5x) while requiring minimal changes to the

existing system design. We show that DUCATI is within 20%, 5%, and 2% the performance of a perfect LLT

system when using 4KB, 64KB, and 2MB pages respectively.