Exploring dynamic parallelism in OpenMP
Güray Özen, Eduard Ayguadé, Jesús Labarta · 2015
GPU devices are becoming a common element in current HPC platforms due to their high performance-per-Watt ratio. However, developing applications able to exploit their dazzling performance is not a trivial task, which becomes even harder when they have irregular data access patterns or control flows. Dynamic Parallelism (DP) has been introduced in the most recent GPU architecture as a mechanism to improve applicability of GPU computing in these situations, resource utilization and execution performance. DP allows to launch a kernel within a kernel without intervention of the CPU. Current experiences reveal that DP is offered to programmers at the expenses of an excessive overhead which, together with its architecture dependency, makes it difficult to see the benefits in real applications.