HPCwire: Compilers and More: A GPU and Accelerator Programming Model

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December 09, 2008

Compilers and More: A GPU and Accelerator Programming Model

by Michael Wolfe, Compiler Engineer, The Portland Group, Inc.

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Okay, maybe the title should be "Languages and More," but I promise to talk about compilers further on below.

In recent columns, I've discussed parallel programming and programming GPUs and accelerators in particular. In May, I predicted that accelerator-based systems would dominate high performance computing, and suggested that an evolutionary approach to migrating applications from CPUs to accelerators was possible and appropriate. In September, I discussed in more detail the specifics of GPU hardware architecture, pointing out its strengths for high performance computing (lots of parallelism), as well as its weaknesses (limited to specific parallelism domains). In October, I showed what it takes to start porting a CPU program to a GPU, exposing some of the complexities of the interactions between the host and the GPU. The specific examples use NVIDIA's very popular CUDA language, but I discuss OpenCL briefly as well (which should be about ready for public discussion about the time you read this). In my most recent column, I showed the details of optimizing a simple matmul kernel for a GPU, including testing various ways to organize it and vary the parallelism parameters.

If you read these, or are familiar with current approaches to programming accelerators, you are either discomforted by the complexities, or excited at the levels of control you can get. The low-level programming model in CUDA and OpenCL certainly has its place, though it's not for the faint of heart. So, to go back to the first of those columns, can we come up with a different model of GPU and accelerator programming, one that retains most of the advantages of CUDA or OpenCL, but without requiring complete program rewrites, that can be applied to different target accelerators, and that retains the potential to develop and test in a more accessible environment? In short, a model that allows HPC programmers to focus on domain science instead of on computer science?

Architectural Model

Let's start by looking at the features of the architecture that we want to use to advantage. Current GPUs are specific implementations of a programming model that works well for graphics problems. They support two levels of parallelism: an outer fully-parallel doall loop level, and an inner synchronous (SIMD or vector) loop level. Each level can be multidimensional (2 or 3 dimensions), but the domain must be strictly rectangular. The synchronous level may not be fully implemented with SIMD or vector operations, so explicit synchronization is supported (and required) across this level. No synchronization is supported between parallel threads across the doall level.

For those familiar with memory models, current GPUs implement a particularly weak model. In particular, they don't support memory coherence between threads, unless those threads are parallel only at the synchronous level and the memory operations are separated by an explicit barrier. Otherwise, if one thread updates a memory location and another reads the same location, or two threads store a value to the same location, the hardware does not guarantee the results. You can't say it gets the wrong answers, because such programs are defined as being in error. There is a software-managed cache on a GPU, and there are some hardware caches that can be used as well, but only in certain situations (and limited to read-only data).

The most significant characteristic is that the memory on the GPU or accelerator is separate from the host memory. The host can't simply read or write to the accelerator memory because it's not mapped into the virtual memory space of the host. Similarly, the accelerator can't simply read or write to host memory; the host memory doesn't support the bandwidth necessary for the accelerator, not to mention the need to support the virtual memory map on the accelerator.

The chips support parallelism on the order of hundreds of threads (today), but effective programs need parallelism on the order of thousands. This provides enough slack parallelism to tolerate long latency memory operations by thread switching, or multithreading, an idea pioneered by the venerable Denelcor HEP almost 30 years ago.

In summary, today's GPUs look like an attached processor with its separate memory, that supports a multidimensional rectangular domain of parallelism, including doall and synchronous parallelism. We'd like a programming model that simplifies most of the hardware details, but gives experts finer levels of control. We probably can't hide the distinction between the two levels of parallelism, but we'd like to avoid requiring the programmer to insert explicit synchronization as much as possible. It's easy to map doall parallelism onto SIMD parallelism, but not the other way around, so we'd like to encourage programmers to program in a doall style when possible and appropriate. We probably can't completely hide the distinction between host memory and accelerator memory, but the details of transferring data should be handled automatically.

But our programming model shouldn't focus on the details of today's GPUs as the ultimate accelerator architecture. One can envision accelerators with mostly (or only) synchronous parallelism (like the Clearspeed CSX700 accelerator processor), or with mostly doall parallelism (like the Tilera TILE64 chip). Future accelerators may share physical and/or virtual memory with the host, and may support a stronger memory model with richer synchronization methods. Software and hardware cache architectures are likely to change rapidly. A robust programming model should express parallelism broadly enough that compilers and tools can map an application onto future generations of accelerators as well as it does onto today's GPUs. In fact, a successful model should be able to map applications onto a multicore X64 processor, where the SSE instructions implement the synchronous parallelism, and the doall parallelism is mapped across cores. From the available details, this model would even map well onto Intel's proposed Larrabee chip. There will be work to tune the performance for each architecture, both in the tools and even at the application level, but the parallelism model needs to be reasonably portable.

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