GPGPU workload characteristics and performance analysis

GPUs are much more power-efficient devices compared to CPUs, but due to several performance bottlenecks, the performance per watt of GPUs is often much lower than what could be achieved theoretically. To sustain and continue high performance computing growth, new architectural and application techniques are required to create power-efficient computing systems. To find such techniques, however, it is necessary to study the power consumption at a detailed level and understand the bottlenecks which cause low performance. Therefore, in this paper, we study GPU power consumption at component level and investigate the bottlenecks that cause low performance and low energy efficiency. We divide the low performance kernels into low occupancy and full occupancy categories. For the low occupancy category, we study if increasing the occupancy helps in increasing performance and energy efficiency. For the full occupancy category, we investigate if these kernels are limited by memory bandwidth, coalescing efficiency, or SIMD utilization.EC/FP7/288653/EU/Low-Power Parallel Computing on GPUs/LPGP

E²MC: Entropy Encoding Based Memory Compression for GPUs

Modern Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) provide much higher off-chip memory bandwidth than CPUs, but many GPU applications are still limited by memory bandwidth. Unfortunately, off-chip memory bandwidth is growing slower than the number of cores and has become a performance bottleneck. Thus, optimizations of effective memory bandwidth play a significant role for scaling the performance of GPUs. Memory compression is a promising approach for improving memory bandwidth which can translate into higher performance and energy efficiency. However, compression is not free and its challenges need to be addressed, otherwise the benefits of compression may be offset by its overhead. We propose an entropy encoding based memory compression (E2MC) technique for GPUs, which is based on the well-known Huffman encoding. We study the feasibility of entropy encoding for GPUs and show that it achieves higher compression ratios than state-of-the-art GPU compression techniques. Furthermore, we address the key challenges of probability estimation, choosing an appropriate symbol length for encoding, and decompression with low latency. The average compression ratio of E2MC is 53% higher than the state of the art. This translates into an average speedup of 20% compared to no compression and 8% higher compared to the state of the art. Energy consumption and energy-delayproduct are reduced by 13% and 27%, respectively. Moreover, the compression ratio achieved by E2MC is close to the optimal compression ratio given by Shannon's source coding theorem.EC/H2020/688759/EU/Low-Power Parallel Computing on GPUs 2/LPGPU