Publications by Author: Luo, Yingwei

2016
Y. Liu, et al., “Barrier-Aware Warp Scheduling for Throughput Processors,” in Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Supercomputing, 2016, pp. 42. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Parallel GPGPU applications rely on barrier synchronization to align thread block activity. Few prior work has studied and characterized barrier synchronization within a thread block and its impact on performance. In this paper, we find that barriers cause substantial stall cycles in barrier-intensive GPGPU applications although GPGPUs employ lightweight hardware-support barriers. To help investigate the reasons, we define the execution between two adjacent barriers of a thread block as a warp-phase. We find that the execution progress within a warp-phase varies dramatically across warps, which we call warp-phase-divergence. While warp-phasedivergence may result from execution time disparity among warps due to differences in application code or input, and/or shared resource contention, we also pinpoint that warp-phase-divergence may result from warp scheduling.

To mitigate barrier induced stall cycle inefficiency, we propose barrier-aware warp scheduling (BAWS). It combines two techniques to improve the performance of barrier-intensive GPGPU applications. The first technique, most-waiting-first (MWF), assigns a higher scheduling priority to the warps of a thread block that has a larger number of warps waiting at a barrier. The second technique, critical-fetch-first (CFF), fetches instructions from the warp to be issued by MWF in the next cycle. To evaluate the efficiency of BAWS, we consider 13 barrier-intensive GPGPU applications, and we report that BAWS speeds up performance by 17% and 9% on average (and up to 35% and 30%) over loosely-round-robin (LRR) and greedy-then-oldest (GTO) warp scheduling, respectively. We compare BAWS against recent concurrent work SAWS, finding that BAWS outperforms SAWS by 7% on average and up to 27%. For non-barrier-intensive workloads, we demonstrate that BAWS is performance-neutral compared to GTO and SAWS, while improving performance by 5.7% on average (and up to 22%) compared to LRR. BAWS’ hardware co

Paper