Employing Software-Managed Caches in OpenACC
Ahmad Lashgar, Amirali Baniasadi · ACM Transactions on Modeling and Performance Evaluation of Computing Systems · 2016
The OpenACC programming model has been developed to simplify accelerator programming and improve development productivity. In this article, we investigate the main limitations faced by OpenACC in harnessing all capabilities of GPU-like accelerators. We build on our findings and discuss the opportunity to exploit a software-managed cache as (i) a fast communication medium and (ii) a cache for data reuse. To this end, we propose a new directive and communication model for OpenACC. Investigating several benchmarks, we show that the proposed directive can improve performance up to 2.54× , and at the cost of minor programming effort.