SIMD Re-Convergence At Thread Frontiers
Gregory Diamos, Benjamin Ashbaugh, Subramaniam Maiyuran, Andrew Kerr, Haicheng Wu, Sudhakar Yalamanchili. “SIMD Re-Convergence At Thread Frontiers.” 44th International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO 44). December 2011.
Abstract
This paper proposes a new technique for automatically mapping arbitrary control flow onto SIMD processors that relies on a concept of a {\em Thread Frontier}, which is a bounded region of the program containing all threads that have branched away from the current warp. This technique is evaluated on a GPU emulator configured to model i) a commodity GPU (Intel Sandybridge), and ii) custom hardware support not realized in current GPU architectures. It is shown that this new technique performs identically to the best existing method for structured control flow, and re-converges at the earliest possible point when executing unstructured control flow. This leads to i) between $1.5-633.2\%$ reductions in dynamic instruction counts for several real applications, ii) simplification of the compilation process, and iii) ability to efficiently add high level unstructured programming constructs (e.g., exceptions) to existing data-parallel languages.
Download
SIMD Re-Convergence At Thread Frontiers [PDF]
Citation
author = {Diamos, Gregory and Ashbaugh, Benjamin and Maiyuran, Subramaniam and Kerr, Andrew and Wu, Haicheng and Yalamanchili, Sudhakar},
title = {SIMD re-convergence at thread frontiers},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 44th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture},
series = {MICRO-44 ’11},
year = {2011},
isbn = {978-1-4503-1053-6},
location = {Porto Alegre, Brazil},
pages = {477–488},
numpages = {12},
url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2155620.2155676},
doi = {10.1145/2155620.2155676},
acmid = {2155676},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
}