Optimizing Hyperplane Sweep Operations Using Asynchronous Multi-grain GPU Tasks

Abstract

General-Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs) are employed in today's fastest supercomputers to accelerate a variety of scientific compute workloads. These workloads typically comprise of data-parallel mathematical kernels that are well suited for execution on GPUs. The hyperplane sweep operation is one such mathematical kernel that is commonly used in high-performance computing. In this paper, we characterize the conventional bulk synchronous hyperplane sweep implementation currently used by GPUs and identify significant performance improvement potential by breaking the operation into finer-grain tasks. Guided by this characterization, we propose multi-grain task decomposition and scheduling techniques to optimize the operation. We use KRIPKE as a case study that features the sweep operation, and we show that our proposed optimizations achieve 41% speedup over the bulk synchronous implementation.