High-performance SIMT code generation in an active visual effects library
Jay L. T. Cornwall, Lee Howes, Paul H. J. Kelly, Phil Parsonage, Bruno Nicoletti · 2009
SIMT (Single-Instruction Multiple-Thread) is an emerging programming paradigm for high-performance computational accelerators, pioneered in current and next generation GPUs and hybrid CPUs. We present a domain-specific active-library supported approach to SIMT code generation and optimisation in the field of visual effects. Our approach uses high-level metadata and runtime context to guide and to ensure the correctness of optimisation-driven code transformations and to implement runtime-context-sensitive optimisations. Our advanced optimisations require no analysis of the original C++ kernel code and deliver 1.3x to 6.6x speedups over syntax-directed translation on GeForce 8800 GTX and GTX 260 GPUs with two commercial visual effects.