Supporting virtual memory in GPGPU without supporting precise exceptions

Abstract

Supporting precise exceptions has been one of the essential components of designing modern out-of-order processors. It allows handling exception routines, including virtual memory support and also supports debugging features. However, GPGPU, one of the recent popular scientific computing platforms, does not support precise exceptions. Here, in this paper, we argue that supporting precise exceptions is not essential for GPGPUs and we propose an alternate solution to provide virtual memory support without supporting precise exceptions.