Characterizing and Optimizing Irregular Applications on Graphics Processing Units
Tao Zhang · 2015
In recent years, GPGPUs have experienced tremendous growth as general-purpose and high-throughput computing devices. Applications from various domains achieve significant speedups using GPGPUs. However, irregular applications do not perform well due to the mismatches between irregular problem structures and SIMD-like GPU architectures. The lack of in-depth characterization and quantifying the ways in which irregular applications differ from regular ones on GPGPUs has prevented users from effectively making use of the hardware resource. To characterize the performance aspects and analyze the bottlenecks, a suite of representative irregular applications are examined on a cycle-accurate GPU simulator as well as a real GPU. The experimental results identify control-flow divergences,