Calculating an upper bound on the finishing time of a group of threads executing on a GPU: a preliminary case study

Raravi, Gurulingesh; Andersson, Björn

http://hdl.handle.net/10400.22/3900

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Authors

Raravi, Gurulingesh

Andersson, Björn

Abstract(s)

Graphics processor units (GPUs) today can be used for computations that go beyond graphics and such use can attain a performance that is orders of magnitude greater than a normal processor. The software executing on a graphics processor is composed of a set of (often thousands of) threads which operate on different parts of the data and thereby jointly compute a result which is delivered to another thread executing on the main processor. Hence the response time of a thread executing on the main processor is dependent on the finishing time of the execution of threads executing on the GPU. Therefore, we present a simple method for calculating an upper bound on the finishing time of threads executing on a GPU, in particular NVIDIA Fermi. Developing such a method is nontrivial because threads executing on a GPU share hardware resources at very fine granularity.