Impacts of optimization strategies on performance, power/energy consumption of a GPU based parallel reduction

Abstract

In the era of modern high performance computing, GPUs have been considered an excellent accelerator for general purpose data-intensive parallel applications. To achieve application speedup from GPUs, many of performance-oriented optimization techniques have been proposed. However, in order to satisfy the recent trend of power and energy consumptions, power/energy-aware optimization of GPUs needs to be investigated with detailed analysis in addition to the performance-oriented optimization. In this work, in order to explore the impact of various optimization strategies on GPU performance, power and energy consumptions, we evaluate performance and power/energy consumption of a well-known application running on different commercial GPU devices with the different optimization strategies. In particular, in order to see the more generalized performance and power consumption patterns of GPU based accelerations, our evaluations are performed with three different Nvdia GPU generations (Fermi, Kepler and Maxwell architectures), various core clock frequencies and memory clock frequencies. We analyze how a GPU kernel execution is affected by optimization and what GPU architectural factors have much impact on its performance and power/energy consumption. This paper also categorizes which optimization technique primarily improves which metric (i.e., performance, power or energy efficiency). Furthermore, voltage frequency scaling (VFS) is also applied to examine the effect of changing a clock frequency on these metrics. In general, our work shows that effective GPU optimization strategies can improve the application performance significantly without increasing power and energy consumption.