L13: Review for Midterm
Administrative
• Project proposals due Friday at 5PM
(hard deadline)
• No makeup class Friday!
• March 23, Guest Lecture
• Austin Robison, NVIDIA
• Topic: Interoperability between CUDA and
Rendering on GPUs
• March 25, MIDTERM in class
Outline
• Questions on proposals?
– Discussion of MPM/GIMP issues
• Review for Midterm
– Describe planned exam
– Go over syllabus
– Review L4: execution model
Reminder: Content of Proposal,
MPM/GIMP as Example
I. Team members: Name and a sentence on expertise for each member
Obvious
II. Problem description
- What is the computation and why is it important?
- Abstraction of computation: equations, graphic or pseudo-code, no more
than 1 page
Straightforward adaptation from MPM presentation and/or code
III. Suitability for GPU acceleration
- Amdahl’s Law: describe the inherent parallelism. Argue that it is close
to 100% of computation. Use measurements from CPU execution of
computation if possible
Can measure sequential code
Remove “history” function
Phil will provide us with a scaled up computation that fits in 512MB
4
CS6963
L10: Floating Point
Reminder: Content of Proposal,
MPM/GIMP as Example
III. Suitability for GPU acceleration, cont.
- Synchronization and Communication: Discuss what data structures may
need to be protected by synchronization, or communication through
host.
Some challenges on boundaries between nodes in grid
- Copy Overhead: Discuss the data footprint and anticipated cost of
copying to/from host memory.
Measure grid and patches to discover data footprint. Consider ways to
combine computations to reduce copying overhead.
IV. Intellectual Challenges
- Generally, what makes this computation worthy of a project?
Importance of computation, and challenges in partitioning computation,
dealing with scope, managing copying overhead
- Point to any difficulties you anticipate at present in achieving high
speedup
See previous
5
CS6963
L10: Floating Point
Midterm Exam
• Goal is to reinforce understanding of
CUDA and NVIDIA architecture
• Material will come from lecture notes
and assignments
• In class, should not be difficult to
finish
Parts of Exam
I. Definitions
– A list of 10 terms you will be asked to define
II. Constraints
- Understand constraints on numbers of threads, blocks, warps, size of
storage
III. Problem Solving
- Derive distance vectors for sequential code and use these to
transform code to CUDA, making use of constant memory
- Given some CUDA code, indicate whether global memory accesses will
be coalesced and whether there will be bank conflicts in shared
memory
- Given some CUDA code, add synchronization to derive a correct
implementation
- Given some CUDA code, provide an optimized version that will have
fewer divergent branches
- Given some CUDA code, derive a partitioning into threads and blocks
that does not exceed various hardware limits
IV. (Brief) Essay Question
- Pick one from a set of 4
How Much? How Many?
• How many threads per block? Max 512
• How many blocks per grid? Max 65535
• How many threads per warp? 32
• How many warps per multiprocessor? 24
• How much shared memory per streaming
multiprocessor? 16Kbytes
• How many registers per streaming
multiprocessor? 8192
• Size of constant cache: 8Kbytes
Syllabus
L1 & L2: Introduction and CUDA Overview
* Not much there…
L3: Synchronization and Data Partitioning
• What does __syncthreads () do?
• Indexing to map portions of a data structure to a particular thread
L4: Hardware and Execution Model
• How are threads in a block scheduled? How are blocks mapped to
streaming multiprocessors?
L5: Dependence Analysis and Parallelization
• Constructing distance vectors
• Determining if parallelization is safe
L6: Memory Hierarchy I: Data Placement
• What are the different memory spaces on the device, who can
read/write them?
• How do you tell the compiler that something belongs in a particular
memory space?
Syllabus
L7: Memory Hierarchy II: Reuse and Tiling
• Safety and profitability of tiling
L8: Memory Hierarchy III: Memory Bandwidth
• Understanding global memory coalescing (for compute capability
< 1.2 and > 1.2)
• Understanding memory bank conflicts
L9: Control Flow
• Divergent branches
• Execution model
L10: Floating Point
• Intrinsics vs. arithmetic operations, what is more precise?
• What operations can be performed in 4 cycles, and what
operations take longer?
L11: Tools: Occupancy Calculator and Profiler
• How do they help you?
Next Time
• March 23:
– Guest Lecture, Austin Robison
• March 25:
– MIDTERM, in class
