1,016 research outputs found
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
Machine Learning Based Auto-tuning for Enhanced OpenCL Performance Portability
Heterogeneous computing, which combines devices with different architectures,
is rising in popularity, and promises increased performance combined with
reduced energy consumption. OpenCL has been proposed as a standard for
programing such systems, and offers functional portability. It does, however,
suffer from poor performance portability, code tuned for one device must be
re-tuned to achieve good performance on another device. In this paper, we use
machine learning-based auto-tuning to address this problem. Benchmarks are run
on a random subset of the entire tuning parameter configuration space, and the
results are used to build an artificial neural network based model. The model
can then be used to find interesting parts of the parameter space for further
search. We evaluate our method with different benchmarks, on several devices,
including an Intel i7 3770 CPU, an Nvidia K40 GPU and an AMD Radeon HD 7970
GPU. Our model achieves a mean relative error as low as 6.1%, and is able to
find configurations as little as 1.3% worse than the global minimum.Comment: This is a pre-print version an article to be published in the
Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed
Processing Symposium Workshops (IPDPSW). For personal use onl
MP-STREAM: A Memory Performance Benchmark for Design Space Exploration on Heterogeneous HPC Devices
Sustained memory throughput is a key determinant
of performance in HPC devices. Having an accurate estimate of
this parameter is essential for manual or automated design space
exploration for any HPC device. While there are benchmarks for
measuring the sustained memory bandwidth for CPUs and GPUs,
such a benchmark for FPGAs has been missing. We present
MP-STREAM, an OpenCL-based synthetic micro-benchmark for
measuring sustained memory bandwidth, optimized for FPGAs,
but which can be used on multiple platforms. Our main contribution
is the introduction of various generic as well as device-specific
parameters that can be tuned to measure their effect on memory
bandwidth. We present results of running our benchmark on a
CPU, a GPU and two FPGA targets, and discuss our observations.
The experiments underline the utility of our benchmark for
optimizing HPC applications for FPGAs, and provide valuable
optimization hints for FPGA programmers
CU2CL: A CUDA-to-OpenCL Translator for Multi- and Many-core Architectures
The use of graphics processing units (GPUs) in
high-performance parallel computing continues to become more
prevalent, often as part of a heterogeneous system. For years,
CUDA has been the de facto programming environment for
nearly all general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) applications. In spite
of this, the framework is available only on NVIDIA GPUs,
traditionally requiring reimplementation in other frameworks
in order to utilize additional multi- or many-core devices.
On the other hand, OpenCL provides an open and vendorneutral
programming environment and runtime system. With
implementations available for CPUs, GPUs, and other types of
accelerators, OpenCL therefore holds the promise of a “write
once, run anywhere” ecosystem for heterogeneous computing.
Given the many similarities between CUDA and OpenCL,
manually porting a CUDA application to OpenCL is typically
straightforward, albeit tedious and error-prone. In response
to this issue, we created CU2CL, an automated CUDA-to-
OpenCL source-to-source translator that possesses a novel design
and clever reuse of the Clang compiler framework. Currently,
the CU2CL translator covers the primary constructs found in
CUDA runtime API, and we have successfully translated many
applications from the CUDA SDK and Rodinia benchmark suite.
The performance of our automatically translated applications via
CU2CL is on par with their manually ported countparts
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