Low-Overhead Trace Collection and Profiling on GPU Compute Kernels
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While GPUs can bring substantial speedup to compute-intensive tasks, their programming is notoriously hard. From their programming model, to microarchitectural particularities, the programmer may encounter many pitfalls which may hinder performance in obscure ways. Numerous performance analysis tools provide helpful data on the efficiency of the compute kernels, but few allow the programmer to efficiently gather runtime information directly on the device and pinpoint the sections to optimize. We propose in this article an instrumentation method to collect traces while executing the compute kernel, with a reduced overhead compared with other approaches, by exploiting the inherently parallel behavior of GPUs and compartmentalizing tracing phases. The reference implementation is freely available and induces an average overhead of 1.6 × on a popular scientific computing benchmark and 1.5 × over the kernel execution time. This represents an improvement of an order of magnitude compared with similar work, and proves useful for timing-guided optimizations. The tool generates insightful execution traces and timestamps which can be analyzed to better understand performance issues in the kernel.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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