Conflux provides a parallel programming framework to use CPUs and GPUs in collaboration as components of an integrated computing system. Conflux proposes already known kernel-based architecture that is compatible with CUDA,

1. CONFLUX: GPGPU FOR .NET Eugene Burmako, 2010

2. Videocards: state of the art Equipment – tenth/hundreds of ALU clocked at ~1 GHz Peak performance – 1 SP TFLOPS, > 100 DP GFLOPS API – random memory access, data structures, pointers, subroutines API maturity – nearly four years, several generations of graphics processors

3. Videocards: programmer’s PoV Modern GPU programming models (CUDA, AMD Stream, OpenCL, DirectCompute): Parallel algorithm is defined by the pair: 1) kernel (loop iteration), 2) iteration bounds. Kernel is compiled by the driver. Iteration bounds are used to create grid of threads. Input data is copied to video memory. Execution gets kicked off. Result is copied to main memory.

4. Example: SAXPY via CUDA __global__ void Saxpy(float a, float* X, float* Y) { inti = blockDim.x * blockIdx.x + threadIdx.x; Y[i] = a * X[i] + Y[i]; } cudaMemcpy(X, hX, cudaMemcpyHostToDevice); cudaMemcpy(Y, hY, cudaMemcpyHostToDevice); Saxpy<<<256, (N + 255) / 256>>>(a, hX, hY); cudaMemcpy(hY, Y, cudaMemcpyDeviceToHost);

5. Hot question

6. Official answer

7. In fact Brahma: Data structures: data parallel array. Computations: C# expressions, LINQ combinators. Accelerator v2: Data structures: data parallel array. Computations: arithmetic operators, number of predefined functions. This does the trick for a lot of algorithms. But what if we’ve got branching or non-regular memory access?

8. Example: CUDA interop saxpy = @”__global__ void Saxpy(float a, float* X, float* Y) { inti = blockDim.x * blockIdx.x + threadIdx.x; Y[i] = a * X[i] + Y[i]; }”; nvcuda.cuModuleLoadDataEx(saxpy); nvcuda.cuMemcpyHtoD(X, Y); nvcuda.cuParamSeti(a, X, Y); nvcuda.cuLaunchGrid(256, (N + 255) / 256); nvcuda.cuMemcpyDtoH(Y);

9. Conflux Kernels are written in C#: data structures, local variables, branching, loops float a; float[] x; [Result] float[] y; vari = GlobalIdx.X; y[i] = a * x[i] + y[i];

10. Conflux Avoids explicit interop with unmanaged code, lets programmer use native .NET data types. float[] x, y; varcfg = new CudaConfig(); var kernel = cfg.Configure<Saxpy>(); y = kernel.Execute(a, x, y);

11. How does it work? Front end: decompiles C#. AST transformer: inlines calls, destructures classes and arrays, maps intrinsincs. Back end:generates PTX (NVIDIA GPU assembler) and/or multicoreIL. Interop: binds to nvcuda driver that is capable of executing GPU assembler.

12. Current progress http://bitbucket.org/conflux/conflux Proof of concept. Capable of computing hello-world of parallel computations: matrix multiplication. If we don’t take into account [currently]high overhead incurred by JIT-compilation, the idea works finely even for naïve code generator: 1x CPU < 2x CPU << GPU. Triple license: AGPL, exception for OSS projects, commercial.

13. Demo

14. Future work GPU-specific optimizations (e.g. diagonal stripes for optimizing bandwidth utilization of matrix transposition) Polyhedral model for loop nest optimization (can be configured to fit specific levels and sizes of memory hierarchy, there exist GPU-specific linear heuristics that optimize spatial and temporal locality). Distributed execution (a new level of memory hierarchy if we use polyhedral model).

15. Conclusion Conflux: GPGPU for .NET http://bitbucket.org/conflux/conflux eugene.burmako@confluxhpc.net