High-Performance Tensor Contractions for GPUs

TitleHigh-Performance Tensor Contractions for GPUs
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2016
AuthorsAbdelfattah, A., M. Baboulin, V. Dobrev, J. Dongarra, C. Earl, J. Falcou, A. Haidar, I. Karlin, T. Kolev, I. Masliah, and S. Tomov
Conference NameInternational Conference on Computational Science (ICCS'16)
Date Published2016-06
Conference LocationSan Diego, CA
KeywordsApplications, Batched linear algebra, FEM, gpu, Tensor contractions, Tensor HPC
Abstract

We present a computational framework for high-performance tensor contractions on GPUs. High-performance is difficult to obtain using existing libraries, especially for many independent contractions where each contraction is very small, e.g., sub-vector/warp in size. However, using our framework to batch contractions plus application-specifics, we demonstrate close to peak performance results. In particular, to accelerate large scale tensor-formulated high-order finite element method (FEM) simulations, which is the main focus and motivation for this work, we represent contractions as tensor index reordering plus matrix-matrix multiplications (GEMMs). This is a key factor to achieve algorithmically many-fold acceleration (vs. not using it) due to possible reuse of data loaded in fast memory. In addition to using this context knowledge, we design tensor data-structures, tensor algebra interfaces, and new tensor contraction algorithms and implementations to achieve 90+% of a theoretically derived peak on GPUs. On a K40c GPU for contractions resulting in GEMMs on square matrices of size 8 for example, we are 2.8× faster than CUBLAS, and 8.5× faster than MKL on 16 cores of Intel Xeon E5-2670 (Sandy Bridge) 2.60GHz CPUs. Finally, we apply autotuning and code generation techniques to simplify tuning and provide an architecture-aware, user-friendly interface.

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