Contract-Based General-Purpose GPU Programming

Using GPUs as general-purpose processors has revolutionized parallel computing by offering, for a large and growing set of algorithms, massive data-parallelization on desktop machines. An obstacle to widespread adoption, however, is the difficulty of programming them and the low-level control of the hardware required to achieve good performance. This paper suggests a programming library, SafeGPU, that aims at striking a balance between programmer productivity and performance, by making GPU data-parallel operations accessible from within a classical object-oriented programming language. The solution is integrated with the design-by-contract approach, which increases confidence in functional program correctness by embedding executable program specifications into the program text. We show that our library leads to modular and maintainable code that is accessible to GPGPU non-experts, while providing performance that is comparable with hand-written CUDA code. Furthermore, runtime contract checking turns out to be feasible, as the contracts can be executed on the GPU

Contract-Based General-Purpose GPU Programming

Abstract Using GPUs as general-purpose processors has revolutionized parallel computing by offering, for a large and growing set of algorithms, massive data-parallelization on desktop machines. An obstacle to widespread adoption, however, is the difficulty of programming them and the low-level control of the hardware required to achieve good performance. This paper suggests a programming library, SafeGPU, that aims at striking a balance between programmer productivity and performance, by making GPU data-parallel operations accessible from within a classical object-oriented programming language. The solution is integrated with the design-bycontract approach, which increases confidence in functional program correctness by embedding executable program specifications into the program text. We show that our library leads to modular and maintainable code that is accessible to GPGPU non-experts, while providing performance that is comparable with hand-written CUDA code. Furthermore, runtime contract checking turns out to be feasible, as the contracts can be executed on the GPU

PyCUDA and PyOpenCL: A Scripting-Based Approach to GPU Run-Time Code Generation

High-performance computing has recently seen a surge of interest in heterogeneous systems, with an emphasis on modern Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). These devices offer tremendous potential for performance and efficiency in important large-scale applications of computational science. However, exploiting this potential can be challenging, as one must adapt to the specialized and rapidly evolving computing environment currently exhibited by GPUs. One way of addressing this challenge is to embrace better techniques and develop tools tailored to their needs. This article presents one simple technique, GPU run-time code generation (RTCG), along with PyCUDA and PyOpenCL, two open-source toolkits that support this technique. In introducing PyCUDA and PyOpenCL, this article proposes the combination of a dynamic, high-level scripting language with the massive performance of a GPU as a compelling two-tiered computing platform, potentially offering significant performance and productivity advantages over conventional single-tier, static systems. The concept of RTCG is simple and easily implemented using existing, robust infrastructure. Nonetheless it is powerful enough to support (and encourage) the creation of custom application-specific tools by its users. The premise of the paper is illustrated by a wide range of examples where the technique has been applied with considerable success.Comment: Submitted to Parallel Computing, Elsevie

Gunrock: A High-Performance Graph Processing Library on the GPU

For large-scale graph analytics on the GPU, the irregularity of data access and control flow, and the complexity of programming GPUs have been two significant challenges for developing a programmable high-performance graph library. "Gunrock", our graph-processing system designed specifically for the GPU, uses a high-level, bulk-synchronous, data-centric abstraction focused on operations on a vertex or edge frontier. Gunrock achieves a balance between performance and expressiveness by coupling high performance GPU computing primitives and optimization strategies with a high-level programming model that allows programmers to quickly develop new graph primitives with small code size and minimal GPU programming knowledge. We evaluate Gunrock on five key graph primitives and show that Gunrock has on average at least an order of magnitude speedup over Boost and PowerGraph, comparable performance to the fastest GPU hardwired primitives, and better performance than any other GPU high-level graph library.Comment: 14 pages, accepted by PPoPP'16 (removed the text repetition in the previous version v5

A hierarchic task-based programming model for distributed heterogeneous computing

Distributed computing platforms are evolving to heterogeneous ecosystems with Clusters, Grids and Clouds introducing in its computing nodes, processors with different core architectures, accelerators (i.e. GPUs, FPGAs), as well as different memories and storage devices in order to achieve better performance with lower energy consumption. As a consequence of this heterogeneity, programming applications for these distributed heterogeneous platforms becomes a complex task. Additionally to the complexity of developing an application for distributed platforms, developers must also deal now with the complexity of the different computing devices inside the node. In this article, we present a programming model that aims to facilitate the development and execution of applications in current and future distributed heterogeneous parallel architectures. This programming model is based on the hierarchical composition of the COMP Superscalar and Omp Superscalar programming models that allow developers to implement infrastructure-agnostic applications. The underlying runtime enables applications to adapt to the infrastructure without the need of maintaining different versions of the code. Our programming model proposal has been evaluated on real platforms, in terms of heterogeneous resource usage, performance and adaptation.This work has been supported by the European Commission through the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program under contract 687584 (TANGO project) by the Spanish Government under contract TIN2015-65316 and grant SEV-2015-0493 (Severo Ochoa Program) and by Generalitat de Catalunya under contracts 2014-SGR-1051 and 2014-SGR-1272.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

GPUVerify: A Verifier for GPU Kernels

We present a technique for verifying race- and divergence-freedom of GPU kernels that are written in mainstream ker-nel programming languages such as OpenCL and CUDA. Our approach is founded on a novel formal operational se-mantics for GPU programming termed synchronous, delayed visibility (SDV) semantics. The SDV semantics provides a precise definition of barrier divergence in GPU kernels and allows kernel verification to be reduced to analysis of a sequential program, thereby completely avoiding the need to reason about thread interleavings, and allowing existing modular techniques for program verification to be leveraged. We describe an efficient encoding for data race detection and propose a method for automatically inferring loop invari-ants required for verification. We have implemented these techniques as a practical verification tool, GPUVerify, which can be applied directly to OpenCL and CUDA source code. We evaluate GPUVerify with respect to a set of 163 kernels drawn from public and commercial sources. Our evaluation demonstrates that GPUVerify is capable of efficient, auto-matic verification of a large number of real-world kernels

A Domain Specific Approach to High Performance Heterogeneous Computing

Users of heterogeneous computing systems face two problems: firstly, in understanding the trade-off relationships between the observable characteristics of their applications, such as latency and quality of the result, and secondly, how to exploit knowledge of these characteristics to allocate work to distributed computing platforms efficiently. A domain specific approach addresses both of these problems. By considering a subset of operations or functions, models of the observable characteristics or domain metrics may be formulated in advance, and populated at run-time for task instances. These metric models can then be used to express the allocation of work as a constrained integer program, which can be solved using heuristics, machine learning or Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) frameworks. These claims are illustrated using the example domain of derivatives pricing in computational finance, with the domain metrics of workload latency or makespan and pricing accuracy. For a large, varied workload of 128 Black-Scholes and Heston model-based option pricing tasks, running upon a diverse array of 16 Multicore CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs platforms, predictions made by models of both the makespan and accuracy are generally within 10% of the run-time performance. When these models are used as inputs to machine learning and MILP-based workload allocation approaches, a latency improvement of up to 24 and 270 times over the heuristic approach is seen.Comment: 14 pages, preprint draft, minor revisio

Evaluation of Directive-Based GPU Programming Models on a Block Eigensolver with Consideration of Large Sparse Matrices

Achieving high performance and performance portability for large-scale scientific applications is a major challenge on heterogeneous computing systems such as many-core CPUs and accelerators like GPUs. In this work, we implement a widely used block eigensolver, Locally Optimal Block Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient (LOBPCG), using two popular directive based programming models (OpenMP and OpenACC) for GPU-accelerated systems. Our work differs from existing work in that it adopts a holistic approach that optimizes the full solver performance rather than narrowing the problem into small kernels (e.g., SpMM, SpMV). Our LOPBCG GPU implementation achieves a 2.8$${\times }$$–4.3$${\times }$$ speedup over an optimized CPU implementation when tested with four different input matrices. The evaluated configuration compared one Skylake CPU to one Skylake CPU and one NVIDIA V100 GPU. Our OpenMP and OpenACC LOBPCG GPU implementations gave nearly identical performance. We also consider how to create an efficient LOBPCG solver that can solve problems larger than GPU memory capacity. To this end, we create microbenchmarks representing the two dominant kernels (inner product and SpMM kernel) in LOBPCG and then evaluate performance when using two different programming approaches: tiling the kernels, and using Unified Memory with the original kernels. Our tiled SpMM implementation achieves a 2.9$${\times }$$ and 48.2$${\times }$$ speedup over the Unified Memory implementation on supercomputers with PCIe Gen3 and NVLink 2.0 CPU to GPU interconnects, respectively

GraphBLAST: A High-Performance Linear Algebra-based Graph Framework on the GPU

High-performance implementations of graph algorithms are challenging to implement on new parallel hardware such as GPUs because of three challenges: (1) the difficulty of coming up with graph building blocks, (2) load imbalance on parallel hardware, and (3) graph problems having low arithmetic intensity. To address some of these challenges, GraphBLAS is an innovative, on-going effort by the graph analytics community to propose building blocks based on sparse linear algebra, which will allow graph algorithms to be expressed in a performant, succinct, composable and portable manner. In this paper, we examine the performance challenges of a linear-algebra-based approach to building graph frameworks and describe new design principles for overcoming these bottlenecks. Among the new design principles is exploiting input sparsity, which allows users to write graph algorithms without specifying push and pull direction. Exploiting output sparsity allows users to tell the backend which values of the output in a single vectorized computation they do not want computed. Load-balancing is an important feature for balancing work amongst parallel workers. We describe the important load-balancing features for handling graphs with different characteristics. The design principles described in this paper have been implemented in "GraphBLAST", the first high-performance linear algebra-based graph framework on NVIDIA GPUs that is open-source. The results show that on a single GPU, GraphBLAST has on average at least an order of magnitude speedup over previous GraphBLAS implementations SuiteSparse and GBTL, comparable performance to the fastest GPU hardwired primitives and shared-memory graph frameworks Ligra and Gunrock, and better performance than any other GPU graph framework, while offering a simpler and more concise programming model.Comment: 50 pages, 14 figures, 14 table