Decoupled Affine Computation for SIMT GPUs
Kai Wang, Calvin Lin · 2017
This paper introduces a method of decoupling affine computations---a class of expressions that produces extremely regular values across SIMT threads---from the main execution stream, so that the affine computations can be performed with greater efficiency and with greater independence from the main execution stream. This decoupling has two benefits: (1) For compute-bound programs, it significantly reduces the dynamic warp instruction count; (2) for memory-bound workloads, it significantly reduces memory latency, since it acts as a non-speculative prefetcher for the data specified by the many memory address calculations that are affine computations.