Automatic restructuring of GPU kernels for exploiting inter-thread data locality

Abstract

Hundreds of cores per chip and support for fine-grain multithreading have made GPUs a central player in today's HPC world. For many applications, however, achieving a high fraction of peak on current GPUs, still requires significant programmer effort. A key consideration for optimizing GPU code is determining a suitable amount of work to be performed by each thread. Thread granularity not only has a direct impact on occupancy but can also influence data locality at the register and shared-memory levels. This paper describes a software framework to analyze dependencies in parallel GPU threads and perform source-level restructuring to obtain GPU kernels with varying thread granularity. The framework supports specification of coarsening factors through source-code annotation and also implements a heuristic based on estimated register pressure that automatically recommends coarsening factors for improved memory performance. We present preliminary experimental results on a select set of CUDA kernels. The results show that the proposed strategy is generally able to select profitable coarsening factors. More importantly, the results demonstrate a clear need for automatic control of thread granularity at the software level for achieving higher performance. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.