A Visual Approach to Investigating Shared and Global Memory Behavior of CUDA Kernels

TitleA Visual Approach to Investigating Shared and Global Memory Behavior of CUDA Kernels
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2013
AuthorsPaul Rosen
JournalComputer Graphics Forum
Volume32
Issue3pt2
Pagination161-170
ISSN01677055
Call Number88800188
Abstract

We present an approach to investigate the memory behavior of a parallel kernel executing on thousands of threads simultaneously within the CUDA architecture. Our top-down approach allows for quickly identifying any significant differences between the execution of the many blocks and warps. As interesting warps are identified, we allow further investigation of memory behavior by visualizing the shared memory bank conflicts and global memory coalescence, first with an overview of a single warp with many operations and, subsequently, with a detailed view of a single warp and a single operation. We demonstrate the strength of our approach in the context of a parallel matrix transpose kernel and a parallel 1D Haar Wavelet transform kernel.

DOI10.1111/cgf.12103