Exploiting Intra-SM Parallelism in GPUs via Persistent and Elastic Blocks

Abstract

Emerging GPUs have multiple Streaming Multiprocessors (SM), while each SM is comprised of CUDA Cores and Tensor Cores. While CUDA Cores do the general computation, Tensor Cores are designed to speed up matrix multiplication for deep learning applications. However, a GPU kernel often either uses CUDA Cores or Tensor Cores, leaving the other processing units idle. Although many prior research works have been proposed to co-locate kernels to improve GPU utilization, they cannot leverage the Intra-SM CUDA Core-Tensor Core Parallelism. We therefore propose Plasticine to exploit the intra-SM parallelism for maximizing the GPU throughput. Plasticine involves compilation and runtime schedule to achieve the above purpose. Experimental results on an Nvidia 2080Ti GPU show that Plasticine improves the system-wide throughput by 15.3% compared with prior co-location work.