Exploiting Adaptive Data Compression to Improve Performance and Energy-Efficiency of Compute Workloads in Multi-GPU Systems

Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) performance has relied heavily on our ability to scale of number of transistors on chip, in order to satisfy the ever-increasing demands for more computation. However, transistor scaling has become extremely challenging, limiting the number of transistors that can be crammed onto a single die. Manufacturing large, fast and energy-efficient monolithic GPUs, while growing the number of stream processing units on-chip, is no longer a viable solution to scale performance. GPU vendors are aiming to exploit multi-GPU solutions, interconnecting multiple GPUs in the single node with a high bandwidth network (such as NVLink), or exploiting Multi-Chip-Module (MCM) packaging, where multiple GPU modules are integrated in a single package. The inter-GPU bandwidth is an expensive and critical resource for designing multi-GPU systems. The design of the inter-GPU network can impact performance significantly. To address this challenge, in this paper we explore the potential of hardware-based memory compression algorithms to save bandwidth and improve energy efficiency in multi-GPU systems. Specifically, we propose an adaptive inter-GPU data compression scheme to efficiently improve both performance and energy efficiency. Our evaluation shows that the proposed optimization on multi-GPU architectures can reduce the inter-GPU traffic up to 62%, improve system performance by up to 33%, and save energy spent powering the communication fabric by 45%, on average.