Helping Software Exploit Hardware

Kelly A. Shaw, University of Richmond, Virginia

Stevenson Hall 1300
12:00 PM - 12:50 PM

In order to gain improved performance and reduced power consumption, computer architects create specialized hardware geared for specific computations. Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are specialized processors designed for applications with large amounts of regular and parallel computation. While these specialized processors offer performance and power benefits, these advantages come at a cost. These devices are frequently less well understood and more difficult to program than general-purpose processors. In this talk, I present two approaches we created to help GPU software developers. Starchart provides developers with a tool that enables them to systematically and quickly understand how to tune important characteristics of their applications. The second approach, called MRPB, automatically prioritizes and reorders memory accesses to increase the benefits obtained from data caching in GPUs.