Diogenes: Looking for an Honest CPU/GPU Performance Measurement Tool

Authors: Benjamin R. Welton (University of Wisconsin), Barton P. Miller (University of Wisconsin)

Abstract: GPU accelerators have become common on today’s leadership-class computing platforms. Exploiting the additional parallelism offered by GPUs is fraught with challenges. A key performance challenge faced by developers is how to limit the time consumed by synchronization and memory transfers between the CPU and GPU. We introduce the feed-forward measurement (FFM) performance tool model that automates the identification of unnecessary or inefficient synchronization and memory transfer, providing an estimate of potential benefit if the problem were fixed. FFM uses a new multi-stage/multi-run instrumentation model that adjusts instrumentation based application behavior on prior runs, guiding FFM to problematic GPU operations that were previously unknown. The collected data feeds a new analysis model that gives an accurate estimate of potential benefit of fixing the problem. We created an implementation of FFM called Diogenes that we have used to identify problems in four real-world scientific applications.


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