Characterizing the performance benefits of fused CPU/GPU systems using FusionSim

  • Authors:
  • Vitaly Zakharenko;Tor Aamodt;Andreas Moshovos

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Toronto;University of British Columbia;University of Toronto

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the Conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

We use FusionSim to characterize the performance of the Rodinia benchmarks on fused and discrete systems. We demonstrate that the speed-up due to fusion is highly correlated with the input data size. We demonstrate that for benchmarks that benefit most from fusion, a 9.72x speed up is possible for small problem sizes. This speedup reduces to 1.84x with medium or large problem sizes. We study a simple, software-managed coherence solution for the fused system. We find that it imposes a minor performance overhead of 2% for most benchmarks and as high as 5% for some. Finally, we develop an analytical model for the performance benefit that is to be expected from fusion for applications with a simple communication and computation pattern and show that FusionSim follows the predicted performance trend.