Efficient conditional operations for data-parallel architectures
Ujval J. Kapasi, William J. Dally, Scott Rixner, Peter R. Mattson, John D. Owens, Brucek Khailany · 2000
Many data-parallel applications, including emerging media applications, have regular structures that can easily be expressed as a series of arithmetic kernels operating on data streams.Data-parallel architectures are designed to exploit this regularity by performing the same operation on many data elements concurrently.However, applications containing data-dependent control constructs perform poorly on these architectures.Conditional streams convert these constructs into data-dependent data movement.This allows data-parallel architectures to efficiently execute applications with data-dependent control flow.Essentially, conditional streams extend the range of applications that a data-parallel architecture can execute efficiently.For example, polygon rendering speeds up by a factor of 1.8 with the use of conditional streams.