日期：2016年12月20日

这篇笔记摘自Professional CUDA C Programming：

In general, the host cannot directly access device variables, and the device cannot directly access host variables. There is one exception to this rule: zero-copy memory. Both the host and device can access zero-copy memory.

GPU threads can directly access zero-copy memory. There are several advantages to using zero-copy memory in CUDA kernels, such as:
➤ Leveraging host memory when there is insufficient device memory
➤ Avoiding explicit data transfer between the host and device
➤ Improving PCIe transfer rates
When using zero-copy memory to share data between the host and device, you must synchronize memory accesses across the host and device. Modifying data in zero-copy memory from both the host and device at the same time will result in undefned behavior.

There are two common categories of heterogeneous computing system architectures: Integrated and discrete.

In integrated architectures, CPUs and GPUs are fused onto a single die and physically share main memory. In this architecture, zero-copy memory is more likely to benefit both performance and programmability because no copies over the PCIe bus are necessary.

For discrete systems with devices connected to the host via PCIe bus, zero-copy memory is advantageous only in special cases.

Because the mapped pinned memory is shared between the host and device, you must synchronize memory accesses to avoid any potential data hazards caused by multiple threads accessing the same memory location without synchronization.

Be careful to not overuse zero-copy memory. Device kernels that read from zero-copy memory can be very slow due to its high-latency.

这篇笔记摘自Professional CUDA C Programming：

Allocated host memory is by default pageable, that is, subject to page fault operations that move data in host virtual memory to different physical locations as directed by the operating system. Virtual memory offers the illusion of much more main memory than is physically available, just as the L1 cache offers the illusion of much more on-chip memory than is physically available.

The GPU cannot safely access data in pageable host memory because it has no control over when the host operating system may choose to physically move that data. When transferring data from pageable host memory to device memory, the CUDA driver first allocates temporary page-locked or pinned host memory, copies the source host data to pinned memory, and then transfers the data from pinned memory to device memory, as illustrated on the left side of Figure 4-4.

The CUDA runtime allows you to directly allocate pinned host memory using:
cudaError_t cudaMallocHost(void **devPtr, size_t count);
This function allocates count bytes of host memory that is page-locked and accessible to the device. Since the pinned memory can be accessed directly by the device, it can be read and written with much higher bandwidth than pageable memory. However, allocating excessive amounts of pinned memory might degrade host system performance, since it reduces the amount of pageable memory available to the host system for storing virtual memory data.