University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Performance portability of parallel kernels on shared-memory systems

Stratton, John

Content Files
John_Stratton.pdf

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/44383

Description

Title
Performance portability of parallel kernels on shared-memory systems
Author(s)
Stratton, John
Issue Date
2013-05-24T22:09:48Z
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Hwu, Wen-Mei W.
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Hwu, Wen-Mei W.
Committee Member(s)
  • Chen, Deming
  • Lumetta, Steven S.
  • Padua, David A.
Department of Study
Electrical & Computer Eng
Discipline
Electrical & Computer Engr
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Date of Ingest
2013-05-24T22:09:48Z
Keyword(s)
  • Performance Portability
  • OpenCL
  • CUDA
  • C++AMP
Abstract
This work describes my solution to the performance portability problem: between CPUs and GPUs in particular, but laying the foundation for even broader performance portability support. I argue that the best approach is to use a language like OpenCL as a portable, low-level programming model with well-defined mechanisms for expressing multi-level parallelism and locality. That low-level program representation can be supported with architecture-specific compilers, runtimes, and libraries to target the application code to various platforms with high performance. High-level language designers or tool developers could then target this single, low-level programming and parallelism model as a portable, high-performance intermediate program representation. To demonstrate the feasibility of this approach, I show how one would design a good CPU implementation of OpenCL given that the programs are written according to the current high-level GPU vendor optimization guidelines. Programs written in such a way already meet the criteria of good GPU performance, and in this work, I show that those same programs on a CPU platform implemented according to my proposals can out-perform an OpenMP implementation of the same algorithm on the same system.
Graduation Semester
2013-05
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/44383
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2013 John Stratton

Owning Collections

Graduate Dissertations and Theses at Illinois PRIMARY
Graduate Theses and Dissertations at Illinois
Dissertations and Theses - Electrical and Computer Engineering
Dissertations and Theses in Electrical and Computer Engineering