BSGP: bulk-synchronous GPU programming

  • Authors:
  • Qiming Hou;Kun Zhou;Baining Guo

  • Affiliations:
  • Tsinghua University;Microsoft Research Asia;Tsinghua University and Microsoft Research Asia

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGGRAPH 2008 papers
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

We present BSGP, a new programming language for general purpose computation on the GPU. A BSGP program looks much the same as a sequential C program. Programmers only need to supply a bare minimum of extra information to describe parallel processing on GPUs. As a result, BSGP programs are easy to read, write, and maintain. Moreover, the ease of programming does not come at the cost of performance. A well-designed BSGP compiler converts BSGP programs to kernels and combines them using optimally allocated temporary streams. In our benchmark, BSGP programs achieve similar or better performance than well-optimized CUDA programs, while the source code complexity and programming time are significantly reduced. To test BSGP's code efficiency and ease of programming, we implemented a variety of GPU applications, including a highly sophisticated X3D parser that would be extremely difficult to develop with existing GPU programming languages.