English

Accelerating GPU-Based Out-of-Core Stencil Computation with On-the-Fly Compression

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing 2021-09-14 v1

Abstract

Stencil computation is an important class of scientific applications that can be efficiently executed by graphics processing units (GPUs). Out-of-core approach helps run large scale stencil codes that process data with sizes larger than the limited capacity of GPU memory. However, the performance of the GPU-based out-of-core stencil computation is always limited by the data transfer between the CPU and GPU. Many optimizations have been explored to reduce such data transfer, but the study on the use of on-the-fly compression techniques is far from sufficient. In this study, we propose a method that accelerates the GPU-based out-of-core stencil computation with on-the-fly compression. We introduce a novel data compression approach that solves the data dependency between two contiguous decomposed data blocks. We also modify a widely used GPU-based compression library to support pipelining that overlaps CPU/GPU data transfer with GPU computation. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieved a speedup of 1.2x compared the method without compression. Moreover, although the precision loss involved by compression increased with the number of time steps, the precision loss was trivial up to 4,320 time steps, demonstrating the usefulness of the proposed method.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2109.05410,
  title  = {Accelerating GPU-Based Out-of-Core Stencil Computation with On-the-Fly Compression},
  author = {Jingcheng Shen and Yifan Wu and Masao Okita and Fumihiko Ino},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.05410},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

7 pages, 7 figures, color

R2 v1 2026-06-24T05:53:18.304Z