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uBench: exposing the impact of CUDA block geometry in terms of performance

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Abstract

The choice of thread-block size and shape is one of the most important user decisions when a parallel problem is written for any CUDA architecture. The reason is that thread-block geometry has a significant impact on the global performance of the program. Unfortunately, the programmer has not enough information about the subtle interactions between this choice of parameters and the underlying hardware.

This paper presents uBench, a complete suite of micro-benchmarks, in order to explore the impact on performance of (1) the thread-block geometry choice criteria, and (2) the GPU hardware resources and configurations. Each micro-benchmark has been designed to be as simple as possible to focus on a single effect derived from the hardware and thread-block parameter choice.

As an example of the capabilities of this benchmark suite, this paper shows an experimental evaluation and comparison of Fermi and Kepler architectures. Our study reveals that, in spite of the new hardware details introduced by Kepler, the principles underlying the block geometry selection criteria are similar for both architectures.

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Acknowledgements

This research is partly supported by the Ministerio de Industria, Spain (CENIT OCEANLIDER), MINECO (Spain) and the European Union FEDER (MOGECOPP project TIN2011-25639, CAPAP-H network TIN2010-12011-E and TIN2011-15734-E), Junta de Castilla y León (VA172A12-2), and the HPC-EUROPA2 project (project number: 228398) with the support of the European Commission—Capacities Area—Research Infrastructures Initiative.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad de Valladolid, Valladolid, Spain

    Yuri Torres, Arturo Gonzalez-Escribano & Diego R. Llanos

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  1. Yuri Torres
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  2. Arturo Gonzalez-Escribano
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  3. Diego R. Llanos
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Correspondence to Arturo Gonzalez-Escribano.

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Torres, Y., Gonzalez-Escribano, A. & Llanos, D.R. uBench: exposing the impact of CUDA block geometry in terms of performance. J Supercomput 65, 1150–1163 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-013-0921-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-013-0921-z

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