Measuring Performance of Constant Memory Experiment

1. Measuring Performance of Constant Memory These notes will introduce: Results of an experiment using constant memory ITCS 6/8010 CUDA Programming, UNC-Charlotte, B. Wilkinson, March 3, 2011 ConstantMemTiming.ppt

2. Program The test program simply adds two vectors A and B together to produce a third vector, C One version uses constant memory for A and B Another version uses regular global memory for A and B Note maximum available for constant memory on the GPU (all compute capabilities so far) is 64 Kbytes total.

3. Code Array declarations #define N 8192 // max size allowed for two vectors in const. mem // Constants held in constant memory __device__ __constant__ int dev_a_Cont[N]; __device__ __constant__ int dev_b_Cont[N]; // regular global memory for comparison __device__ int dev_a[N]; __device__ int dev_b[N]; // result in device global memory __device__ int dev_c[N];

4. // kernel routines __global__ void add_Cont() { // using constant memory int tid = blockIdx.x * blockDim.x + threadIdx.x; if(tid < N){ dev_c[tid] = dev_a_Cont[tid] + dev_b_Cont[tid]; } } __global__ void add() { //not using constant memory int tid = blockIdx.x * blockDim.x + threadIdx.x; if(tid < N){ dev_c[tid] = dev_a[tid] + dev_b[tid]; } }

5. /*----------- GPU using constant memory ------------------------*/ printf("GPU using constant memory\n"); for(int i=0;i<N;i++) { // load arrays with some numbers a[i] = i; b[i] = i*2; } // copy vectors to constant memory cudaMemcpyToSymbol(dev_a_Cont,a,N*sizeof(int),0,cudaMemcpyHostToDevice); cudaMemcpyToSymbol(dev_b_Cont,b,N*sizeof(int),0,cudaMemcpyHostToDevice); cudaEventRecord(start, 0); // start time add_Cont<<<B,T>>>(); // does not need array ptrs cudaThreadSynchronize(); // wait for all threads to complete cudaEventRecord(stop, 0); // end time cudaMemcpyFromSymbol(a,"dev_a_Cont",N*sizeof(int),0,cudaMemcpyDeviceToHost); cudaMemcpyFromSymbol(b,"dev_b_Cont",N*sizeof(int),0,cudaMemcpyDeviceToHost); cudaMemcpyFromSymbol(c,"dev_c",N*sizeof(int),0,cudaMemcpyDeviceToHost); cudaEventSynchronize(stop); cudaEventElapsedTime(&elapsed_time_Cont, start, stop); Watch for this zero. I missed it off and it took some time to spot Missed originally

6. /*----------- GPU not using constant memory ------------------------*/ printf("GPU using constant memory\n"); for(int i=0;i<N;i++) { // load arrays with some numbers a[i] = i; b[i] = i*2; } // copy vectors to constant memory cudaMemcpyToSymbol(dev_a_Cont,a,N*sizeof(int),0,cudaMemcpyHostToDevice); cudaMemcpyToSymbol(dev_b_Cont,b,N*sizeof(int),0,cudaMemcpyHostToDevice); cudaEventRecord(start, 0); // start time add<<<B,T>>>(); // does not need array ptrs cudaThreadSynchronize(); // wait for all threads to complete cudaEventRecord(stop, 0); // end time cudaMemcpyFromSymbol(a,"dev_a_Cont",N*sizeof(int),0,cudaMemcpyDeviceToHost); cudaMemcpyFromSymbol(b,"dev_b_Cont",N*sizeof(int),0,cudaMemcpyDeviceToHost); cudaMemcpyFromSymbol(c,"dev_c",N*sizeof(int),0,cudaMemcpyDeviceToHost); cudaEventSynchronize(stop); cudaEventElapsedTime(&elapsed_time, start, stop);

7. Speedup around 1.2 after first launch (20%) 1st launch, 1.6 2nd run, 1.217 3rd run, 1.225

8. Questions