Judging a type by its pointer: optimizing GPU virtual functions
Mengchi Zhang, Ahmad Alawneh, Timothy G. Rogers · 2021
Programmable accelerators aim to provide the flexibility of traditional CPUs with significantly improved performance. A well-known impediment to the widespread adoption of programmable accelerators, like GPUs, is the software engineering overhead involved in porting the code. Existing support for C++ on GPUs allows programmers to port polymorphic code with little effort. However, the overhead from the virtual functions introduced by polymorphic code has not been well studied or mitigated on GPUs.