Low-Overhead Trace Collection and Profiling on GPU Compute Kernels
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".