This guide introduces the Assess, Parallelize, Optimize, Deploy(APOD) design cycle for applications with the goal of helping application developers to rapidly identify the portions of their code that would most readily benefit from GPU acceleration, rapidly realize that benefit, and begin leveraging the resulting speedups in production as early as possible. An optimized handling of strided accesses using coalesced reads from global memory uses the shared transposedTile to avoid uncoalesced accesses in the second term in the dot product and the shared aTile technique from the previous example to avoid uncoalesced accesses in the first term. For more information on this pragma, refer to the CUDA C++ Programming Guide. Computing a row of a tile. Shared memory banks are organized such that successive 32-bit words are assigned to successive banks and the bandwidth is 32 bits per bank per clock cycle. In other words, a cubin object generated for compute capability X.y will only execute on devices of compute capability X.z where zy. (tens of kBs capacity) Global memory is main memory (GDDR,HBM, (1-32 GB)) and data is cached by L2,L1 caches. Some aspects of this behavior such as cache location and maximum cache size can be controlled via the use of environment variables; see Just in Time Compilation of the CUDA C++ Programming Guide. When using the driver APIs directly, we recommend using the new driver entry point access API (cuGetProcAddress) documented here: CUDA Driver API :: CUDA Toolkit Documentation. Because it is on-chip, shared memory has much higher bandwidth and lower latency than local and global memory - provided there are no bank conflicts between the threads, as detailed in the following section. One or more compute capability versions can be specified to the nvcc compiler while building a file; compiling for the native compute capability for the target GPU(s) of the application is important to ensure that application kernels achieve the best possible performance and are able to use the features that are available on a given generation of GPU. For devices of compute capability 1.x, the warp size is 32 threads and the number of banks is 16. Reproduction of information in this document is permissible only if approved in advance by NVIDIA in writing, reproduced without alteration and in full compliance with all applicable export laws and regulations, and accompanied by all associated conditions, limitations, and notices. Regardless of this possibility, it is good practice to verify that no higher-priority recommendations have been overlooked before undertaking lower-priority items. The for loop over i multiplies a row of A by a column of B, which is then written to C. The effective bandwidth of this kernel is 119.9 GB/s on an NVIDIA Tesla V100. The throughput of __sinf(x), __cosf(x), and__expf(x) is much greater than that of sinf(x), cosf(x), and expf(x). Weak Scaling and Gustafsons Law, 3.1.3.3. While multiple contexts (and their associated resources such as global memory allocations) can be allocated concurrently on a given GPU, only one of these contexts can execute work at any given moment on that GPU; contexts sharing the same GPU are time-sliced. Dynamic parallelism - passing contents of shared memory to spawned blocks? When you parallelize computations, you potentially change the order of operations and therefore the parallel results might not match sequential results. Automatic variables that are likely to be placed in local memory are large structures or arrays that would consume too much register space and arrays that the compiler determines may be indexed dynamically. NVIDIA Corporation (NVIDIA) makes no representations or warranties, expressed or implied, as to the accuracy or completeness of the information contained in this document and assumes no responsibility for any errors contained herein. An additional set of Perl and Python bindings are provided for the NVML API. So threads must wait approximatly 4 cycles before using an arithmetic result. See Building for Maximum Compatibility for further discussion of the flags used for building code for multiple generations of CUDA-capable device simultaneously. Weaknesses in customers product designs may affect the quality and reliability of the NVIDIA product and may result in additional or different conditions and/or requirements beyond those contained in this document. Often this means the use of directives-based approaches, where the programmer uses a pragma or other similar notation to provide hints to the compiler about where parallelism can be found without needing to modify or adapt the underlying code itself. Best performance with synchronous copy is achieved when the copy_count parameter is a multiple of 4 for all three element sizes. The third generation NVLink has the same bi-directional data rate of 50 GB/s per link, but uses half the number of signal pairs to achieve this bandwidth. The compiler replaces a branch instruction with predicated instructions only if the number of instructions controlled by the branch condition is less than or equal to a certain threshold. When multiple threads in a block use the same data from global memory, shared memory can be used to access the data from global memory only once. See Math Libraries. The kernel also uses the default stream, and it will not begin execution until the memory copy completes; therefore, no explicit synchronization is needed. Per thread resources required by a CUDA kernel might limit the maximum block size in an unwanted way. One of the key differences is the fused multiply-add (FMA) instruction, which combines multiply-add operations into a single instruction execution. It may be different with non-unit-strided accesses, however, and this is a pattern that occurs frequently when dealing with multidimensional data or matrices. Current GPUs can simultaneously process asynchronous data transfers and execute kernels. Please see the MSDN documentation for these routines for more information. As even CPU architectures will require exposing parallelism in order to improve or simply maintain the performance of sequential applications, the CUDA family of parallel programming languages (CUDA C++, CUDA Fortran, etc.) Checking these things frequently as an integral part of our cyclical APOD process will help ensure that we achieve the desired results as rapidly as possible. Can this be done? Because execution within a stream occurs sequentially, none of the kernels will launch until the data transfers in their respective streams complete. Medium Priority: Use shared memory to avoid redundant transfers from global memory. While compiler optimization improvements continually seek to narrow this gap, explicit multiplication (or the use of an equivalent purpose-built inline function or macro) can have a significant advantage. In the asynchronous version of the kernel, instructions to load from global memory and store directly into shared memory are issued as soon as __pipeline_memcpy_async() function is called. Use of such information may require a license from a third party under the patents or other intellectual property rights of the third party, or a license from NVIDIA under the patents or other intellectual property rights of NVIDIA. As PTX is compiled by the CUDA driver, new toolchains will generate PTX that is not compatible with the older CUDA driver. Customer should obtain the latest relevant information before placing orders and should verify that such information is current and complete. All rights reserved. Support for Bfloat16 Tensor Core, through HMMA instructions. Understanding Scaling discusses the potential benefit we might expect from such parallelization. Applications that do not check for CUDA API errors could at times run to completion without having noticed that the data calculated by the GPU is incomplete, invalid, or uninitialized. The context is explicit in the CUDA Driver API but is entirely implicit in the CUDA Runtime API, which creates and manages contexts automatically. Then with a tile size of 32, the shared memory buffer will be of shape [32, 32]. A noteworthy exception to this are completely random memory access patterns. More details are available in the CUDA C++ Programming Guide. If all threads of a warp access the same location, then constant memory can be as fast as a register access. Using asynchronous copies does not use any intermediate register. The following examples use the cuBLAS library from CUDA Toolkit 5.5 as an illustration: In a shared library on Linux, there is a string field called the SONAME that indicates the binary compatibility level of the library. All kernel launches are asynchronous, as are memory-copy functions with the Async suffix on their names. I'm not sure if this will fit your overall processing. cudaStreamSynchronize() blocks the CPU thread until all CUDA calls previously issued into the given stream have completed. Whats the grammar of "For those whose stories they are"? Device memory allocation and de-allocation via cudaMalloc() and cudaFree() are expensive operations. Data should be kept on the device as long as possible. This data will thus use the L2 set-aside portion. Error counts are provided for both the current boot cycle and the lifetime of the GPU. CUDA Toolkit and Minimum Driver Versions. These accept one of three options:cudaFuncCachePreferNone, cudaFuncCachePreferShared, and cudaFuncCachePreferL1. A device in which work is poorly balanced across the multiprocessors will deliver suboptimal performance. In contrast with cudaMemcpy(), the asynchronous transfer version requires pinned host memory (see Pinned Memory), and it contains an additional argument, a stream ID. If the PTX is also not available, then the kernel launch will fail. CUDA-GDB is a port of the GNU Debugger that runs on Linux and Mac; see: https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gdb. For devices of compute capability 2.x, there are two settings, 48KBshared memory / 16KB L1 cache, and 16KB shared memory / 48KB L1 cache. This is important for a number of reasons; for example, it allows the user to profit from their investment as early as possible (the speedup may be partial but is still valuable), and it minimizes risk for the developer and the user by providing an evolutionary rather than revolutionary set of changes to the application. So, in clamp mode where N = 1, an x of 1.3 is clamped to 1.0; whereas in wrap mode, it is converted to 0.3. To achieve high memory bandwidth for concurrent accesses, shared memory is divided into equally sized memory modules (banks) that can be accessed simultaneously. Unlike the CUDA Driver, the CUDA Runtime guarantees neither forward nor backward binary compatibility across versions. It supports a number of command-line parameters, of which the following are especially useful for optimization and related best practices: -maxrregcount=N specifies the maximum number of registers kernels can use at a per-file level. If instead i is declared as signed, where the overflow semantics are undefined, the compiler has more leeway to use these optimizations. -use_fast_math compiler option of nvcc coerces every functionName() call to the equivalent __functionName() call. Avoid long sequences of diverged execution by threads within the same warp. In CUDA only threads and the host can access memory. Browse other questions tagged, Where developers & technologists share private knowledge with coworkers, Reach developers & technologists worldwide, How Intuit democratizes AI development across teams through reusability. FP16 / FP32 Computing a row of a tile in C using one row of A and an entire tile of B.. In this code, the canMapHostMemory field of the structure returned by cudaGetDeviceProperties() is used to check that the device supports mapping host memory to the devices address space. The number of copy engines on a GPU is given by the asyncEngineCount field of the cudaDeviceProp structure, which is also listed in the output of the deviceQuery CUDA Sample. Ensure global memory accesses are coalesced. When an application will be deployed to target machines of arbitrary/unknown configuration, the application should explicitly test for the existence of a CUDA-capable GPU in order to take appropriate action when no such device is available. read- only by GPU) Shared memory is said to provide up to 15x speed of global memory Registers have similar speed to shared memory if reading same address or no bank conicts. See the CUDA C++ Programming Guide for details. For devices of compute capability 8.0 (i.e., A100 GPUs) the maximum shared memory per thread block is 163 KB. The performance guidelines and best practices described in the CUDA C++ Programming Guide and the CUDA C++ Best Practices Guide apply to all CUDA-capable GPU architectures. Package managers facilitate this process but unexpected issues can still arise and if a bug is found, it necessitates a repeat of the above upgrade process. For each iteration i of the for loop, the threads in a warp read a row of the B tile, which is a sequential and coalesced access for all compute capabilities. In this case, multiple broadcasts from different banks are coalesced into a single multicast from the requested shared memory locations to the threads. Dealing with relocatable objects is not yet supported, therefore the cuLink* set of APIs in the CUDA driver will not work with enhanced compatibility. As a result, Thrust can be utilized in rapid prototyping of CUDA applications, where programmer productivity matters most, as well as in production, where robustness and absolute performance are crucial. Like Volta, the NVIDIA Ampere GPU architecture combines the functionality of the L1 and texture caches into a unified L1/Texture cache which acts as a coalescing buffer for memory accesses, gathering up the data requested by the threads of a warp prior to delivery of that data to the warp. CUDA Memory Rules Currently can only transfer data from host to global (and constant memory) and not host directly to shared. Lets assume that A and B are threads in two different warps. One of several factors that determine occupancy is register availability. This information is obtained by calling cudaGetDeviceProperties() and accessing the information in the structure it returns. Many codes accomplish a significant portion of the work with a relatively small amount of code. Because the data is not cached on the GPU, mapped pinned memory should be read or written only once, and the global loads and stores that read and write the memory should be coalesced. We evaluate the performance of both kernels using elements of size 4B, 8B and 16B per thread i.e., using int, int2 and int4 for the template parameter. The high-priority recommendations from those guides are as follows: Find ways to parallelize sequential code. Minimize redundant accesses to global memory whenever possible. If L1-caching is enabled on these devices, the number of required transactions is equal to the number of required 128-byte aligned segments. These results should be compared with those in Table 2. So, in the previous example, had the two matrices to be added already been on the device as a result of some previous calculation, or if the results of the addition would be used in some subsequent calculation, the matrix addition should be performed locally on the device. The last argument to the cudaMemcpyAsync() function is the stream ID, which in this case uses the default stream, stream 0. If sequential threads in a warp access memory that is sequential but not aligned with a 32-byte segment, five 32-byte segments will be requested, as shown in Figure 4. The texture cache is optimized for 2D spatial locality, so threads of the same warp that read texture addresses that are close together will achieve best performance. Another benefit of its union with shared memory, similar to Volta L1 is improvement in terms of both latency and bandwidth. Whether a device has this capability is indicated by the concurrentKernels field of the cudaDeviceProp structure (or listed in the output of the deviceQuery CUDA Sample). Here cudaEventRecord() is used to place the start and stop events into the default stream, stream 0. With UVA, the host memory and the device memories of all installed supported devices share a single virtual address space. Sometimes, the compiler may unroll loops or optimize out if or switch statements by using branch predication instead. Useful Features for tex1D(), tex2D(), and tex3D() Fetches, __launch_bounds__(maxThreadsPerBlock,minBlocksPerMultiprocessor), Using the CUDA Occupancy Calculator to project GPU multiprocessor occupancy, cudaOccupancyMaxActiveBlocksPerMultiprocessor, // When the program/library launches work, // When the program/library is finished with the context, Table 5. An example would be modeling how two molecules interact with each other, where the molecule sizes are fixed. If an appropriate native binary (cubin) is not available, but the intermediate PTX code (which targets an abstract virtual instruction set and is used for forward-compatibility) is available, then the kernel will be compiled Just In Time (JIT) (see Compiler JIT Cache Management Tools) from the PTX to the native cubin for the device. Having identified the hotspots and having done the basic exercises to set goals and expectations, the developer needs to parallelize the code. Prior to CUDA 11.0, the minimum driver version for a toolkit was the same as the driver shipped with that version of the CUDA Toolkit. NVIDIA Corporation (NVIDIA) makes no representations or warranties, expressed or implied, as to the accuracy or completeness of the information contained in this document and assumes no responsibility for any errors contained herein. Access to shared memory is much faster than global memory access because it is located on chip. In short, CPU cores are designed to minimize latency for a small number of threads at a time each, whereas GPUs are designed to handle a large number of concurrent, lightweight threads in order to maximize throughput. nvidia-smi is targeted at Tesla and certain Quadro GPUs, though limited support is also available on other NVIDIA GPUs.