Parametric GPU Code Generation for Affine Loop Programs

Partitioning a parallel computation into finite-sized chunks for effective mapping onto a parallel machine is a critical concern for source-to-source compilation. In the context of OpenCL and CUDA, this translates to the definition of a uniform hyper-rectangular partitioning of the parallel execution space where each partition is subject to a fine-grained distribution of resources that has a direct yet hard to estimate impact on performance. This paper develops the first compilation scheme for generating parametrically tiled codes for affine loop programs on GPUs, which facilitates run-time exploration of partitioning parameters as a fast and portable way of finding the ones that yield maximum performance. Our approach is based on a parametric tiling scheme for producing wavefronts of parallel rectangular partitions of parametric size and a novel runtime system that manages wavefront execution and local memory usage dynamically through an inspector-executor mechanism. An experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach for wavefront as well as rectangularly-parallel partitionings.