Nvidia GP100 die layout, c/o Anandtech

CIS 601: Special Topics in Computer Architecture: GPGPU Programming Spring 2017

Course Information

instructor: Joe Devietti
when: Tuesday/Thursday 10:30-noon
where: Towne 321
contact: piazza, email, canvas

office hours:

  • Tuesday 2-3pm, Levine 572

Course Description

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have become extremely popular and are used to accelerate an increasingly diverse set of non-graphics workloads. This seminar will examine modern GPU architectures, the programming models used to write general-purpose code for GPUs, and the complexities of programming such highly parallel architectures. There will be a special emphasis on concurrency correctness issues as they relate to GPUs, including GPU memory consistency models and GPU concurrency bugs. Graduate-level coursework in computer architecture (e.g., CIS 501) will be very helpful.

Course Materials

No textbooks are required; links to all readings will be provided at this website.

Grading

  • Project: 40%
  • Participation: 20%
  • Assignments: 15%
  • Future work write-ups: 15%
  • Paper questions: 10%

There will be no exams.

Submit homework, paper questions and future-work write-ups via Canvas

The class project can be done alone or in groups of 2. The project is open-ended: it should be something related to GPUs but the specifics are up to you. Choosing a project that incorporates your interests (research or otherwise) is a great idea!

Course Schedule

This schedule is subject to change

Date Topic Presenter
Thursday 12 Jan Intro Joe
Tuesday 17 Jan CUDA Basics Joe
Thursday 19 Jan GPU Architecture Overview Joe
Tuesday 24 Jan Joe
Thursday 26 Jan Joe
Tuesday 31 Jan Real-world GPU Architectures Joe
Thursday 2 Feb CUDA Performance Tuning Nsight video tutorial (memory profiling starts at 41:40), Nsight documentation Joe
Tuesday 7 Feb No class: Joe traveling -
Thursday 9 Feb No class: Joe traveling -
Tuesday 14 Feb CUDA miscellany, profiling Joe
Thursday 16 Feb CUDA Synchronization Joe
Tuesday 21 Feb A Primer on Memory Consistency and Cache Coherence, Chapters 3-5 (SC, TSO, RC) Joe
Thursday 23 Feb No class: Joe traveling -
Tuesday 28 Feb Heterogeneous-Race-Free Memory Models slides JJ, Max
Thursday 2 Mar GPU concurrency: Weak Behaviours and Programming Assumptions slides JJ, Max
Tuesday 7 Mar No class: spring break -
Thursday 9 Mar No class: spring break -
Tuesday 14 Mar Debunking the 100X GPU vs. CPU myth: an evaluation of throughput computing on CPU and GPU slides Omar, Richard
Thursday 16 Mar Rodinia Benchmark Suite slides Grayson, Shreyas, Akshay
Tuesday 21 Mar MemcachedGPU: Scaling-up Scale-out Key-value Stores DJ, Hans
Thursday 23 Mar GPUfs slides Shreyas, Yishuai
Tuesday 28 Mar Dynamic Warp Formation slides Eric, Grayson, Romita
Thursday 30 Mar Dynamic Warp Subdivision for Integrated Branch and Memory Divergence Tolerance Kavya, Richard
Tuesday 4 Apr The Dual-Path Execution Model for Efficient GPU Control Flow slides DJ, Hans, Romita
Thursday 6 Apr Cache-Conscious Wavefront Scheduling Kavya, Akshay
Tuesday 11 Apr Unifying Primary Cache, Scratch, and Register File Memories in a Throughput Processor Archana, Shveta
Thursday 13 Apr Cache Coherence for GPU Architectures Archana, Yishuai
Tuesday 18 Apr Towards high performance paged memory for GPUs Eric, Omar
Thursday 20 Apr project presentations -
Tuesday 25 Apr project presentations -

Project Ideas

  • Investigate time savings from approximate GPU computing. Consider replacing data types with narrower-width versions, e.g., converting 64-bit doubles to 32-bit floats, or 16-bit integers to 8-bit integers. How does this affect running time and accuracy of the computation?
  • Investigating scalable locking in CUDA, from simple spin-locks to something like MCS locks. The lack of coherence on GPUs should add an interesting wrinkle. Useful resources are Michael Scott’s webpage and the SSync library from EPFL.
  • Port an application of interest to you to CUDA.
  • your idea here!