High-performance code generation for stencil computations on GPU architectures

  • Authors:
  • Justin Holewinski;Louis-Noël Pouchet;P. Sadayappan

  • Affiliations:
  • The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA;The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA;The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 26th ACM international conference on Supercomputing
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Stencil computations arise in many scientific computing domains, and often represent time-critical portions of applications. There is significant interest in offloading these computations to high-performance devices such as GPU accelerators, but these architectures offer challenges for developers and compilers alike. Stencil computations in particular require careful attention to off-chip memory access and the balancing of work among compute units in GPU devices. In this paper, we present a code generation scheme for stencil computations on GPU accelerators, which optimizes the code by trading an increase in the computational workload for a decrease in the required global memory bandwidth. We develop compiler algorithms for automatic generation of efficient, time-tiled stencil code for GPU accelerators from a high-level description of the stencil operation. We show that the code generation scheme can achieve high performance on a range of GPU architectures, including both nVidia and AMD devices.