CUDA number of data cannot be divide by the CUDA threads evenly - cuda

For example, there are two 4-threads, but I have 5 data, the first 0-3 can be mapped to the first 4-threads, how about the rest, it only says there might be a runtime error, but how to fix it?
I think I ask this question in the wrong direction, now suppose I have
perfromwork<<<2,2>>>;
Now my dataIndex calculated by this pseudocode is smaller than the number of data elements(N=5), so what to do with the last one (5-2x2=1)? If I use another block for it, it will come across the same problem, the <<<2, 2>>> block will create a larger dataIndex.

There are two canonical approaches here.
Size the grid to be larger than or equal to the data set size, and make sure to use a "thread check" that prevents unneeded extra threads from doing any work.
Use a grid-stride loop, which allows the grid size to be determined independently from the data set size (if you wish) while still providing correct results.
vector add example kernels for each:
__global__ void vectorAdd(float *x, float *y, float *z, int size){
int idx = threadIdx.x+blockDim.x*blockIdx.x;
if (idx < size) // thread check
z[idx] = x[idx] + y[idx];
}
The above kernel does not use a grid-stride loop. It will require that you size the grid to be larger than or equal to the data set size, in order for all elements to be processed. That sizing code might look like this:
int size = MY_DATA_SET_SIZE;
dim3 block(256); // this is threads per block, the choice here is not critical for correctness, but must be 1 or larger and less than or equal to 1024;
dim3 grid((size+block.x-1)/block.x);
vectorAdd<<<grid,block>>>(...);
A kernel implementing a grid-stride loop to do the same thing might look like this:
__global__ void vectorAdd(float *x, float *y, float *z, int size){
for (int idx = threadIdx.x+blockDim.x*blockIdx.x; idx < size; idx += blockDim.x*gridDim.x)
z[idx] = x[idx] + y[idx];
}
In this case, grid sizing can be arbitrary (1 or larger) and still yield correct results.

Related

Add multiple vectors concurrently in cuda

I want to design a kernel to add a matrix row pairs concurrently, but I don't know how to accomplish it.
For example, I have a data matrix, which size is (512, 1024), and I want to add its row pairs(row1+row2, row3+row4,...,row511+row512) at same time.
The reason I’m considering doing this is just for saving time.
Could you give me some advice?
Thanks!
Something like this may be useful:
const int width = 1024;
const int rows = 512;
template <typename T>
__global__ void row_add(const T * __restrict__ din, T * __restrict__ dout){
int idx = width*2*blockIdx.x + threadIdx.x;
if (dout == din)
dout[idx] += dout[idx+width];
else
dout[idx-blockIdx.x*width] = din[idx]+din[idx+width];
}
It depends on the width dimension being 1024 or less. You would launch it like this:
row_add<<<rows/2, width>>>(d_in, d_out);
If you pass it different pointers for d_in and d_out, it will assume you want the output written contiguously to a separate array. If you pass it the same pointer for d_in and d_out, it will assume you want the results of row 0+1 written to row 0, the results of row 2+3 written to row 2, and so on.
The rows dimension has to be an even number, obviously from your problem statement (adding rows pairwise).
coded in browser, not tested, may contain bugs

dot_product with CUDA_CUB

__global__ void sum(const float * __restrict__ indata, float * __restrict__ outdata) {
unsigned int tid = blockIdx.x * blockDim.x + threadIdx.x;
// --- Specialize BlockReduce for type float.
typedef cub::BlockReduce<float, BLOCKSIZE> BlockReduceT;
// --- Allocate temporary storage in shared memory
__shared__ typename BlockReduceT::TempStorage temp_storage;
float result;
if(tid < N) result = BlockReduceT(temp_storage).Sum(indata[tid]);
// --- Update block reduction value
if(threadIdx.x == 0) outdata[blockIdx.x] = result;
return;
}
I have tested the reduction sum(as shown in above code snippet) with cuda cub successfully, I want to perform the inner product of two vectors based on this code. But I have some confusions about it:
We need two input vectors for the inner_product, need I to conduct a component-wise multiplication of this two input vectors before the reduction sum on the resulting new vector.
In the code examples of the cuda cub, the dimension of input vectors is equal to the blocknumber*threadnumber. what if we have a very large vector.
Yes, with cub, and assuming your vectors were stored separately (i.e. not interleaved), you would need to do an element-wise multiplication first. On the other hand, thrust transform_reduce could handle it in a single function call.
blocknumber*threadnumber should give you all the range you need. on a cc3.0 or higher GPU, blocknumber (i.e. gridDim.x) can range up to 2^31-1 and threadnumber (i.e. blockDim.x) can range up to 1024. This gives you the possibility to handle 2^40 elements. If each element is 4 bytes, this would constitute (i.e. require) 2^42 bytes. That is about 4TB (or double that if you are considering 2 input vectors), which is much larger than any GPU memory currently. So you will run out of GPU memory space before you run out of grid dimension.
Note that what you are showing is cub::BlockReduce. However if you are doing a vector dot product of two large vectors, you might want to use cub::DeviceReduce instead.

CUDA atomicAdd using thread.x not returning expected results

I've been experimenting with atomic operations in CUDA, but I can't get thread index numbers to be included in the operations, it looks like they are just treated as zeros as in the examples shown below:
Is there anything I'm doing wrong in the code below?
Code 1: adding thread index value to dest[10] (not working, dest[10] is 0 after running, I would expect it to be greater than 0 as it would add the value of the index to dest[10] each time)
__global__ void add_test(int* dest, float *a, float *b, float *c)
{
int ix = ((blockIdx.x * blockDim.x) + threadIdx.x);
int idx = threadIdx.x;
atomicAdd(dest+10,idx);
}
Code 2: if I use a constant, then it seems to work (at the end of the run dest[10]=2, but again I would expect it to be greater than 2 as it should add 2 for every running thread/block):
__global__ void add_test(int* dest, float *a, float *b, float *c)
{
int ix = ((blockIdx.x * blockDim.x) + threadIdx.x);
int idx = threadIdx.x;
atomicAdd(dest+10,2);
}
My test call looks like:
add_test<<<(1024,1,1), (41,1584,1)>>>
This isn't a valid kernel launch:
add_test<<<(1024,1,1), (41,1584,1)>>>
You cannot ask for thread block dimensions of (41,1584,1)
My guess is you are doing no proper cuda error checking and have not run your code with cuda-memcheck, as either of these would have indicated the error, and that your kernel is not running properly.
The maximum in either of the first two dimensions is either 512 or 1024, and the maximum combined dimensions (i.e. the product of the dimensions = total threads) is 512 or 1024 depending on GPU.
In the future, please provide a complete, compilable code if you are asking for help with a code that is not working. SO expects this and it is a valid close reason for your question if you don't.

Implementing Max Reduce in Cuda

I've been learning Cuda and I am still getting to grips with parallelism. The problem I am having at the moment is implementing a max reduce on an array of values. This is my kernel
__global__ void max_reduce(const float* const d_array,
float* d_max,
const size_t elements)
{
extern __shared__ float shared[];
int tid = threadIdx.x;
int gid = (blockDim.x * blockIdx.x) + tid;
if (gid < elements)
shared[tid] = d_array[gid];
__syncthreads();
for (unsigned int s=blockDim.x/2; s>0; s>>=1)
{
if (tid < s && gid < elements)
shared[tid] = max(shared[tid], shared[tid + s]);
__syncthreads();
}
if (gid == 0)
*d_max = shared[tid];
}
I have implemented a min reduce using the same method (replacing the max function with the min) which works fine.
To test the kernel, I found the min and max values using a serial for loop. The min and max values always come out the same in the kernel but only the min reduce matches up.
Is there something obvious I'm missing/doing wrong?
Your main conclusion in your deleted answer was correct: the kernel you have posted doesn't comprehend the fact that at the end of that kernel execution, you have done a good deal of the overall reduction, but the results are not quite complete. The results of each block must be combined (somehow). As pointed out in the comments, there are a few other issues with your code as well. Let's take a look at a modified version of it:
__device__ float atomicMaxf(float* address, float val)
{
int *address_as_int =(int*)address;
int old = *address_as_int, assumed;
while (val > __int_as_float(old)) {
assumed = old;
old = atomicCAS(address_as_int, assumed,
__float_as_int(val));
}
return __int_as_float(old);
}
__global__ void max_reduce(const float* const d_array, float* d_max,
const size_t elements)
{
extern __shared__ float shared[];
int tid = threadIdx.x;
int gid = (blockDim.x * blockIdx.x) + tid;
shared[tid] = -FLOAT_MAX; // 1
if (gid < elements)
shared[tid] = d_array[gid];
__syncthreads();
for (unsigned int s=blockDim.x/2; s>0; s>>=1)
{
if (tid < s && gid < elements)
shared[tid] = max(shared[tid], shared[tid + s]); // 2
__syncthreads();
}
// what to do now?
// option 1: save block result and launch another kernel
if (tid == 0)
d_max[blockIdx.x] = shared[tid]; // 3
// option 2: use atomics
if (tid == 0)
atomicMaxf(d_max, shared[0]);
}
As Pavan indicated, you need to initialize your shared memory array. The last block launched may not be a "full" block, if gridDim.x*blockDim.x is greater than elements.
Note that in this line, even though we are checking that the thread operating (gid) is less than elements, when we add s to gid for indexing into the shared memory we can still index outside of the legitimate values copied into shared memory, in the last block. Therefore we need the shared memory initialization indicated in note 1.
As you already discovered, your last line was not correct. Each block produces it's own result, and we must combine them somehow. One method you might consider if the number of blocks launched is small (more on this later) is to use atomics. Normally we steer people away from using atomics since they are "costly" in terms of execution time. However, the other option we are faced with is saving the block result in global memory, finishing the kernel, and then possibly launching another kernel to combine the individual block results. If I have launched a large number of blocks initially (say more than 1024) then if I follow this methodology I might end up launching two additional kernels. Thus the consideration of atomics. As indicated, there is no native atomicMax function for floats, but as indicated in the documentation, you can use atomicCAS to generate any arbitrary atomic function, and I have provided an example of that in atomicMaxf which provides an atomic max for float.
But is running 1024 or more atomic functions (one per block) the best way? Probably not.
When launching kernels of threadblocks, we really only need to launch enough threadblocks to keep the machine busy. As a rule of thumb we want at least 4-8 warps operating per SM, and somewhat more is probably a good idea. But there's no particular benefit from a machine utilization standpoint to launch thousands of threadblocks initially. If we pick a number like 8 threadblocks per SM, and we have at most, say, 14-16 SMs in our GPU, this gives us a relatively small number of 8*14 = 112 threadblocks. Let's choose 128 (8*16) for a nice round number. There's nothing magical about this, it's just enough to keep the GPU busy. If we make each of these 128 threadblocks do additional work to solve the whole problem, we can then leverage our use of atomics without (perhaps) paying too much of a penalty for doing so, and avoid multiple kernel launches. So how would this look?:
__device__ float atomicMaxf(float* address, float val)
{
int *address_as_int =(int*)address;
int old = *address_as_int, assumed;
while (val > __int_as_float(old)) {
assumed = old;
old = atomicCAS(address_as_int, assumed,
__float_as_int(val));
}
return __int_as_float(old);
}
__global__ void max_reduce(const float* const d_array, float* d_max,
const size_t elements)
{
extern __shared__ float shared[];
int tid = threadIdx.x;
int gid = (blockDim.x * blockIdx.x) + tid;
shared[tid] = -FLOAT_MAX;
while (gid < elements) {
shared[tid] = max(shared[tid], d_array[gid]);
gid += gridDim.x*blockDim.x;
}
__syncthreads();
gid = (blockDim.x * blockIdx.x) + tid; // 1
for (unsigned int s=blockDim.x/2; s>0; s>>=1)
{
if (tid < s && gid < elements)
shared[tid] = max(shared[tid], shared[tid + s]);
__syncthreads();
}
if (tid == 0)
atomicMaxf(d_max, shared[0]);
}
With this modified kernel, when creating the kernel launch, we are not deciding how many threadblocks to launch based on the overall data size (elements). Instead we are launching a fixed number of blocks (say, 128, you can modify this number to find out what runs fastest), and letting each threadblock (and thus the entire grid) loop through memory, computing partial max operations on each element in shared memory. Then, in the line marked with comment 1, we must re-set the gid variable to it's initial value. This is actually unnecessary and the block reduction loop code can be further simplified if we guarantee that the size of the grid (gridDim.x*blockDim.x) is less than elements, which is not difficult to do at kernel launch.
Note that when using this atomic method, it's necessary to initialize the result (*d_max in this case) to an appropriate value, like -FLOAT_MAX.
Again, we normally steer people way from atomic usage, but in this case, it's worth considering if we carefully manage it, and it allows us to save the overhead of an additional kernel launch.
For a ninja-level analysis of how to do fast parallel reductions, take a look at Mark Harris' excellent whitepaper which is available with the relevant CUDA sample.
Here's one that appears naive but isn't. This won't generalize to other functions like sum(), but it works great for min() and max().
__device__ const float float_min = -3.402e+38;
__global__ void maxKernel(float* d_data)
{
// compute max over all threads, store max in d_data[0]
int i = threadIdx.x;
__shared__ float max_value;
if (i == 0) max_value = float_min;
float v = d_data[i];
__syncthreads();
while (max_value < v) max_value = v;
__syncthreads();
if (i == 0) d_data[0] = max_value;
}
Yup, that's right, only syncing once after initialization and once before writing the result. Damn the race conditions! Full speed ahead!
Before you tell me it won't work, please give it a try first. I have tested thoroughly and it works every time on a variety of arbitrary kernel sizes. It turns out that the race condition doesn't matter in this case because the while loop resolves it.
It works significantly faster than a conventional reduction. Another surprise is that the average number of passes for a kernel size of 32 is 4. Yup, that's (log(n)-1), which seems counterintuitive. It's because the race condition gives an opportunity for good luck. This bonus comes in addition to removing the overhead of the conventional reduction.
With larger n, there is no way to avoid at least one iteration per warp, but that iteration only involves one compare operation which is usually immediately false across the warp when max_value is on the high end of the distribution. You could modify it to use multiple SM's, but that would greatly increase the total workload and add a communication cost, so not likely to help.
For terseness I've omitted the size and output arguments. Size is simply the number of threads (which could be 137 or whatever you like). Output is returned in d_data[0].
I've uploaded the working file here: https://github.com/kenseehart/YAMR

Tips for optimizing X_transpose*X CUDA kernel

I am writing my first CUDA application and am writing all the kernels my self for practice.
In one portion I am simply calculating X_transpose * X.
I have been using cudaMallocPitch and cudaMemcpy2D, I first allocate enough space on the device for X and X_transpose*X. I copy X to the device, my kernel takes two inputs, the X matrix, then the space to write the X_transpose * X result.
Using the profiler the kernel originally took 104 seconds to execute on a matrix of size 5000x6000. I pad the matrix with zeros on the host so that it is a multiple of the block size to avoid checking the bounds of the matrix in the kernel. I use a block size of 32 by 32.
I made some changes to try to maximize coalesced reads/writes to global memory, this seemed to help significantly. Using the visual profiler to profile the release build of my code, the kernel now takes 4.27 seconds to execute.
I haven't done an accurate timing of my matlab execution(just the operation X'*X;), but it appears to be about 3 seconds. I was hoping I could get much better speedups than matlab using CUDA.
The nvidia visual profiler is unable to find any issues with my kernel, I was hoping the community here might have some suggestions as to how I can make it go faster.
The kernel code:
__global__ void XTXKernel(Matrix X, Matrix XTX) {
//find location in output matrix
int blockRow = blockIdx.y;
int blockCol = blockIdx.x;
int row = threadIdx.y;
int col = threadIdx.x;
Matrix XTXsub = GetSubMatrix(XTX, blockRow, blockCol);
float Cvalue = 0;
for(int m = 0; m < (X.paddedHeight / BLOCK_SIZE); ++m) {
//Get sub-matrix
Matrix Xsub = GetSubMatrix(X, m, blockCol);
Matrix XTsub = GetSubMatrix(X, m, blockRow);
__shared__ float Xs[BLOCK_SIZE][BLOCK_SIZE];
__shared__ float XTs[BLOCK_SIZE][BLOCK_SIZE];
//Xs[row][col] = GetElement(Xsub, row, col);
//XTs[row][col] = GetElement(XTsub, col, row);
Xs[row][col] = *(float*)((char*)Xsub.data + row*Xsub.pitch) + col;
XTs[col][row] = *(float*)((char*)XTsub.data + row*XTsub.pitch) + col;
__syncthreads();
for(int e = 0; e < BLOCK_SIZE; ++e)
Cvalue += Xs[e][row] * XTs[col][e];
__syncthreads();
}
//write the result to the XTX matrix
//SetElement(XTXsub, row, col, Cvalue);
((float *)((char*)XTXsub.data + row*XTX.pitch) + col)[0] = Cvalue;
}
The definition of my Matrix structure:
struct Matrix {
matrixLocation location;
unsigned int width; //width of matrix(# cols)
unsigned int height; //height of matrix(# rows)
unsigned int paddedWidth; //zero padded width
unsigned int paddedHeight; //zero padded height
float* data; //pointer to linear array of data elements
size_t pitch; //pitch in bytes, the paddedHeight*sizeof(float) for host, device determines own pitch
size_t size; //total number of elements in the matrix
size_t paddedSize; //total number of elements counting zero padding
};
Thanks in advance for your suggestions.
EDIT: I forgot to mention, I am running the on a Kepler card, GTX 670 4GB.
Smaller block size like 16x16 or 8x8 may be faster. This slides also demos larger non-square size of block/shared mem may be faster for particular matrix size.
For shared mem allocation, add a dumy element on the leading dimension by using [BLOCK_SIZE][BLOCK_SIZE+1] to avoid the bank conflict.
Try to unroll the inner for loop by using #pragma unroll
On the other hand, You probably won't be much faster than matlab GPU code for large enough A'*A. Since the performance bottleneck of matlab is the invoking overhead rather than the kernel performance.
The cuBLAS routine culas_gemm() may have highest performance for matrix multiplication. You could compare yours with it.
MAGMA routine magma_gemm() has higher performance than cuBLAS in some cases. It's a open source project. You may also get some ideas from their code.