Overview
Modern multi-GPU systems use unified virtual memory to simplify programming, but UVM page management suffers from NUMA overheads caused by remote accesses, page migrations, and write invalidations. Existing systems often rely on one policy across the workload, even though different pages, objects, and execution phases prefer different policies.
GRIT and OASIS address this problem through adaptive runtime page management. GRIT dynamically learns page-level behavior and selects page placement policies using page faults, page attributes, and neighboring-page similarity. OASIS builds on the same insight but shifts the control point from pages to application objects, using object tracking and an object policy table to learn access patterns with lower metadata and hardware overhead.
GRIT: Fine-Grained Dynamic Page Placement
GRIT uses local page faults and page protection faults as lightweight indicators that the current placement scheme is no longer appropriate.
A software PA-Table records page access attributes, while a small hardware PA-Cache reduces extra memory traffic from metadata lookups.
GRIT leverages the observation that neighboring pages often share similar access behavior and proactively assigns policies to adjacent pages.
OASIS: Object-Aware Page Management
OASIS identifies runtime objects created by managed-memory allocation and associates memory accesses with the corresponding object.
Instead of tracking thousands of pages, OASIS tracks object-level policy state in a compact table, reducing metadata and lookup overhead.
OASIS resets and relearns object policies across explicit or implicit phase changes, allowing the runtime to adapt as object behavior changes.
From GRIT to OASIS
GRIT shows that a single policy cannot match the diversity of multi-GPU memory behavior. It adapts page placement dynamically and improves performance by selecting among on-touch migration, access-counter migration, and duplication during execution.
OASIS observes that pages belonging to the same object usually exhibit consistent access patterns within a phase. This allows the runtime to make fewer, more stable decisions with lower storage and hardware overhead.
Evaluation Highlights
GRIT demonstrates the benefit of dynamic page placement; OASIS preserves the benefit while reducing metadata and design complexity through object-aware management.
Takeaway
GRIT and OASIS show that UVM page management should be dynamic, data-aware, and phase-aware. Together, they form a path from fine-grained page policy learning to a more practical object-level runtime that improves multi-GPU memory efficiency with lower overhead.
Citation
@inproceedings{wang2024grit,
note = {*The authors contribute equally.},
title = {GRIT: Enhancing Multi-GPU Performance with Fine-Grained Dynamic Page Placement},
author = {Wang, Yueqi and Li, Bingyao and Jaleel, Aamer and Yang, Jun and Tang, Xulong},
booktitle = {2024 IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)},
pages = {1080--1094},
year = {2024},
organization = {IEEE},
}
@inproceedings{wang2024oasis,
title = {OASIS: Object-Aware Page Management for Multi-GPU Systems},
author = {Wang, Yueqi and Li, Bingyao and Ziad, Mohamed Tarek Ibn and Eeckhout, Lieven and Yang, Jun and Jaleel, Aamer and Tang, Xulong},
booktitle = {2025 IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)},
year = {2025},
organization = {IEEE},
pages = {1678-1692},
}