Improve the Performance of Parallel Reduction on General-Purpose Graphics Processor Units Using Prediction Models

When executing a kernel function on a general-purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU), it is critical to select an appropriate configuration setting for optimal performance. Configuration settings affect the allocation and utilization of GPGPU resources during the execution of a kernel function1. However, testing all possible configuration settings to find an optimal setting is time-consuming and costly. To address this challenge, we propose a prediction mechanism that can suggest a configuration setting for the kernel function to complete the operation with minimal execution time. We start by filtering the amount of data, mandatory parameters, and optional parameters, and then calculate the resource occupancy of three critical resources on the GPGPU: Warp, Register, and Shared Memory. We eliminate configuration settings with a lower average resource occupancy than the user-defined value. The remaining configuration settings have better execution performance, and we use them to execute the kernel functions and record the required execution time. Finally, we use these configuration settings and their corresponding execution times as training data to build a prediction model using the logistic regression (LR) algorithm. At runtime, the prediction model recommends a configuration setting with better performance when the amount of data to be processed is known. We have conducted experiments that confirm our proposed mechanism's ability to improve kernel function execution performance more effectively than other mechanisms. Note that the proposed mechanism can be applied to other kernel functions.