Exploiting the Task-Pipelined Parallelism of Stream Programs on Many-Core GPUs

Abstract

By exploiting data-level parallelism, Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have become a high-throughput, general purpose computing platform. Many real-world applications especially those following a stream processing pattern, however, feature interleaved task-pipelined and data parallelism. Current GPUs are ill equipped for such applications due to the insufficient usage of computing resources and/or the excessive off-chip memory traffic. In this paper, we focus on microarchitectural enhancements to enable task-pipelined execution of data-parallel kernels on GPUs. We propose an efficient adaptive dynamic scheduling mechanism and a moderately modified L2 design. With minor hardware overhead, our techniques orchestrate both task-pipeline and data parallelisms in a unified manner. Simulation results derived by a cycle-accurate simulator on real-world applications prove that the proposed GPU microarchitecture improves the computing throughput by 18% and reduces the overall accesses to off-chip GPU memory by 13%.