Calculating an upper bound on the finishing time of a group of threads executin...

• Author(s): Raravi, Gurulingesh ; Andersson, Björn
• Date: 2010
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.22/3900
• Origin: Repositório Científico do Instituto Politécnico do Porto
• Document Type: Report
• Language: English

Description

Graphics processor units (GPUs) today can be used for computations that go beyond graphics and such use can attain a performance that is orders of magnitude greater than a normal processor. The software executing on a graphics processor is composed of a set of (often thousands of) threads which operate on different parts of the data and thereby jointly compute a result which is delivered to another thread executing on the main processor. Hence the response time of a thread executing on the main processor is dependent on the finishing time of the execution of threads executing on the GPU. Therefore, we present a simple method for calculating an upper bound on the finishing time of threads executing on a GPU, in particular NVIDIA Fermi. Developing such a method is nontrivial because threads executing on a GPU share hardware resources at very fine granularity.