Compile-time GPU memory access optimizations

Abstract

In the last three years, GPUs are more and more being used for general purpose applications instead of only for computer graphics. Programming these GPUs is a big challenge; in current GPUs the main bottleneck for many applications is not the computing power, but the memory access bandwidth. Two compile-time optimizations are presented in this paper to deal with the two most important memory access issues. To describe these optimizations, a new notation of the parallel execution of GPU programs is introduced. An implementation of the optimizations shows that performance improvements of up to 40 times are possible.