SHF: Small: Techniques and Frameworks for Exploiting Recent SIMD Architectural Advances

Ohio State University, The, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) parallelism has been available in common processors for several decades now, and has been widely exploited for dense matrix and other regular problems. Recent architectural trends, such as increasing width of SIMD lanes coupled with instruction sets, provide significantly enhanced functionality. There is a need to effectively use the new architectural features for dynamic or irregular applications, which have not been easy to perform on parallel on SIMD processors in the past. The PI proposes comprehensive research program on mapping various classes of unstructured and/or irregular applications to modern SIMD novel architectural features and developing optimized compiler transformations from programs written in CUDA and OpenCL. This research proposal proposes to address the challenge of developing and executing unstructured and/or irregular applications using novel SIMD processors' instructions such as scatter and gather. The PI plans to design compiler transformation methods from CUDA and OpenCL programs to increase the number of contiguous accesses and decrease the number of cache lines from which data needs to be accessed. These novel transformation methods are targeting applications such as unstructured grid kernels, sparse matrix computations, and graph and tree traversals. The PI plans to continue development of an Operator Overloading based library.