Title
Accelerating CUDA graph algorithms at maximum warp
Abstract
Graphs are powerful data representations favored in many computational domains. Modern GPUs have recently shown promising results in accelerating computationally challenging graph problems but their performance suffered heavily when the graph structure is highly irregular, as most real-world graphs tend to be. In this study, we first observe that the poor performance is caused by work imbalance and is an artifact of a discrepancy between the GPU programming model and the underlying GPU architecture.We then propose a novel virtual warp-centric programming method that exposes the traits of underlying GPU architectures to users. Our method significantly improves the performance of applications with heavily imbalanced workloads, and enables trade-offs between workload imbalance and ALU underutilization for fine-tuning the performance. Our evaluation reveals that our method exhibits up to 9x speedup over previous GPU algorithms and 12x over single thread CPU execution on irregular graphs. When properly configured, it also yields up to 30% improvement over previous GPU algorithms on regular graphs. In addition to performance gains on graph algorithms, our programming method achieves 1.3x to 15.1x speedup on a set of GPU benchmark applications. Our study also confirms that the performance gap between GPUs and other multi-threaded CPU graph implementations is primarily due to the large difference in memory bandwidth.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1145/1941553.1941590
PPOPP
Keywords
Field
DocType
poor performance,gpu programming model,gpu benchmark application,underlying gpu architecture,maximum warp,accelerating cuda graph algorithm,computationally challenging graph problem,previous gpu algorithm,gpu architecture,performance gap,graph algorithm,performance gain,memory bandwidth,data representation,regular graph,gpgpu,gpu programming
Memory bandwidth,Workload,Computer science,CUDA,Parallel computing,Theoretical computer science,Thread (computing),Implementation,General-purpose computing on graphics processing units,Graph500,Distributed computing,Speedup
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
46
8
0362-1340
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
171
5.87
12
Authors
4
Search Limit
100171
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sungpack Hong186433.20
Sang Kyun Kim276783.95
Tayo Oguntebi336013.47
Kunle Olukotun44532373.50