12 research outputs found
A performance, power, and energy efficiency analysis of load balancing techniques for GPUs
Load balancing is a key aspect to face when implementing any parallel application for Graphic Processing Units (GPUs). It is particularly crucial if one considers that it strongly impacts on performance, power and energy efficiency of the whole application. Many different partitioning techniques have been proposed in the past to deal with either very regular workloads (static techniques) or with irregular workloads (dynamic techniques). Nevertheless, it has been proven that no one of them provides a sound trade-off, from the performance point of view, when applied in both cases. More recently, a dynamic multi-phase approach has been proposed for workload partitioning and work item-to-thread allocation. Thanks to its very low complexity and several architecture-oriented optimizations, it can provide the best results in terms of performance with respect to the other approaches in the literature with both regular and irregular datasets. Besides the performance comparison, no analysis has been conducted to show the effect of all these techniques on power and energy consumption on both GPUs for desktop and GPUs for low-power embedded systems. This paper shows and compares, in terms of performance, power, and energy efficiency, the experimental results obtained by applying all the different static, dynamic, and semi-dynamic techniques at the state of the art to different datasets and over different GPU technologies (i.e., NVIDIA Maxwell GTX 980 device, NVIDIA Jetson Kepler TK1 low-power embedded system)
On the Load Balancing Techniques for GPU Applications Based on Prefix-scan
Prefix-scan is one of the most common operation and building block for a wide range of parallel applications for GPUs. It allows the GPU threads to efficiently find and access in parallel to the assigned data. Nevertheless, the workload decomposition and mapping strategies that make use of prefix-scan can have a significant impact on the overall application performance. This paper presents a classification of the mapping strategies at the state of the art and their comparison to understand in which problem they best apply. Then, it presents Multi-Phase Search, an advanced dynamic technique that addresses the workload unbalancing problem by fully exploiting the GPU device characteristics. In particular, the proposed technique implements a dynamic mapping of work-units to threads through an algorithm whose complexity is sensibly reduced with respect to the other dynamic approaches in the literature. The paper shows, compares, and analyses the experimental results obtained by applying all the mapping techniques to different datasets, each one having very different characteristics and structure
Implementing Push-Pull Efficiently in GraphBLAS
We factor Beamer's push-pull, also known as direction-optimized
breadth-first-search (DOBFS) into 3 separable optimizations, and analyze them
for generalizability, asymptotic speedup, and contribution to overall speedup.
We demonstrate that masking is critical for high performance and can be
generalized to all graph algorithms where the sparsity pattern of the output is
known a priori. We show that these graph algorithm optimizations, which
together constitute DOBFS, can be neatly and separably described using linear
algebra and can be expressed in the GraphBLAS linear-algebra-based framework.
We provide experimental evidence that with these optimizations, a DOBFS
expressed in a linear-algebra-based graph framework attains competitive
performance with state-of-the-art graph frameworks on the GPU and on a
multi-threaded CPU, achieving 101 GTEPS on a Scale 22 RMAT graph.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, International Conference on Parallel Processing
(ICPP) 201
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
A dynamic approach for workload partitioning on GPU architectures
Workload partitioning and the subsequent work item-to-thread mapping are key aspects to face when implementing any efficient GPU application. Different techniques have been proposed to deal with such issues, ranging from the computationally simplest static to the most complex dynamic ones. Each of them finds the best use depending on the workload characteristics (static for more regular workloads, dynamic for irregular workloads). Nevertheless, no one of them provides a sound tradeoff when applied in both cases. Static approaches lead to load unbalancing with irregular problems, while the computational overhead introduced by the dynamic or semi-dynamic approaches often worsens the overall application performance when run on regular problems. This article presents an efficient dynamic technique for workload partitioning and work item-to-thread mapping whose complexity is significantly reduced with respect to the other dynamic approaches in literature. The article shows how the partitioning and mapping algorithm has been implemented by fully taking advantage of the GPU device characteristics with the aim of minimizing the involved computational overhead. The article shows, compares, and analyses the experimental results obtained by applying the proposed approach and several static, dynamic, and semi-dynamic techniques at the state of the art to different benchmarks and over different GPU technologies (i.e., NVIDIA Fermi, Kepler, and Maxwell) to understand when and how each technique best applies
Gunrock: GPU Graph Analytics
For large-scale graph analytics on the GPU, the irregularity of data access
and control flow, and the complexity of programming GPUs, have presented two
significant challenges to 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 characterize the performance of
various optimization strategies and evaluate Gunrock's overall performance on
different GPU architectures on a wide range of graph primitives that span from
traversal-based algorithms and ranking algorithms, to triangle counting and
bipartite-graph-based algorithms. The results show that on a single GPU,
Gunrock has on average at least an order of magnitude speedup over Boost and
PowerGraph, comparable performance to the fastest GPU hardwired primitives and
CPU shared-memory graph libraries such as Ligra and Galois, and better
performance than any other GPU high-level graph library.Comment: 52 pages, invited paper to ACM Transactions on Parallel Computing
(TOPC), an extended version of PPoPP'16 paper "Gunrock: A High-Performance
Graph Processing Library on the GPU