Luke Cartey, Rune Lyngso, Oege de Moor. Synthesising graphics card programs from DSLs. In Proceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation. PLDI '12, pages 121-132, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2012. [doi]
Over the last five years, graphics cards have become a tempting target for scientific computing, thanks to unrivaled peak performance, often producing a runtime speed-up of x10 to x25 over comparable CPU solutions.
However, this increase can be difficult to achieve, and doing so often requires a fundamental rethink. This is especially problematic in scientific computing, where experts do not want to learn yet another architecture.
In this paper we develop a method for automatically parallelising recursive functions of the sort found in scientific papers. Using a static analysis of the function dependencies we identify sets - partitions - of independent elements, which we use to synthesise an efficient GPU implementation using polyhedral code generation techniques. We then augment our language with DSL extensions to support a wider variety of applications, and demonstrate the effectiveness of this with three case studies, showing significant performance improvement over equivalent CPU methods, and similar efficiency to hand-tuned GPU implementations.