OpenACC Cache Directive: Opportunities and Optimizations
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
OpenACC's programming model presents a simple interface to programmers, offering a trade-off between performance and development effort. OpenACC relies on compiler technologies to generate efficient code and optimize for performance. Among the difficult to implement directives, is the cache directive. The cache directive allows the programmer to utilize accelerator's hardware- or software-managed caches by passing hints to the compiler. In this paper, we investigate the implementation aspect of cache directive under NVIDIA-like GPUs and propose optimizations for the CUDA backend. We use CUDA's shared memory as the software-managed cache space. We first show that a straightforward implementation can be very inefficient, and downgrade performance. We investigate the differences between this implementation and hand-written CUDA alternatives and introduce the following optimizations to bridge the performance gap between the two: i) improving occupancy by sharing the cache among several parallel threads and ii) optimizing cache fetch and write routines via parallelization and minimizing control flow. We present compiler passes to apply these optimizations. Investigating three test cases, we show that the best cache directive implementation can perform very close to hand-written CUDA equivalent and improve performance up to 2.18X (compared to the baseline OpenACC.).
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it