Improving GPU Throughput through Parallel Execution Using Tensor Cores and CUDA Cores

Abstract

To accelerate the execution of Machine Learning applications, recent GPUs use Tensor cores to speed up the general matrix multiplication (GEMM), which is the heart of deep learning. The Streaming Processors in such GPUs also contain CUDA cores to implement general computations. While the Tensor cores can significantly improve the performance of GEMM, the CUDA cores remain idle when Tensor cores are running. This leads to inefficient resource utilization. In this work, we propose to offload part of the GEMM operations from Tensor cores to CUDA cores to fully utilize GPU resources. We investigated the performance bottleneck in such offloading schemes and proposed architectural optimization to maximize the GPU throughput. Our technique is purely hardware-based and does not require a new compiler or other software support. Our evaluation results show that the proposed scheme can improve performance by 19% at the maximum.