Optimizing GPU programs by partial evaluation

Abstract

While GPU utilization allows one to speed up computations to the orders of magnitude, memory management remains the bottleneck making it often a challenge to achieve the desired performance. Hence, different memory optimizations are leveraged to make memory being used more effectively. We propose an approach automating memory management utilizing partial evaluation, a program transformation technique that enables data accesses to be pre-computed, optimized, and embedded into the code, saving memory transactions. An empirical evaluation of our approach shows that the transformed program could be up to 8 times as efficient as the original one in the case of CUDA C naïve string pattern matching algorithm implementation.