PWR055: Consider applying offloading parallelism to forall loop

Issue

The loop containing the forall pattern can be made faster by offloading it to an accelerator.

Actions

Implement a version of the forall loop using an Application Program Interface (API) that enables offloading to accelerators. Codee assists the programmer by providing source code rewriting capabilities using OpenMP and OpenACC compiler directives.

Relevance

Offloading a loop to an accelerator is one of the ways to speed it up. Accelerators offer a huge computational power, but writing code for accelerators is not straightforward. Essentially, the programmer must explicitly manage the data transfers between the host and the accelerator, specify how to execute the loop in parallel on the accelerator, as well as add the appropriate synchronization to avoid race conditions at runtime. Typically, minimizing the computational overhead of offloading is the biggest challenge to speedup the code using accelerators.

Note
Offloading forall loops typically incurs less overhead than offloading scalar reduction loops and sparse reduction loops. The main reason is that no synchronization is needed to avoid race conditions and ensure the correctness of the code. Note appropriate data scoping of shared and private variables is still a must.

Code examples

Have a look at the following code snippet:

void example(double *D, double *X, double *Y, int n, double a) {
  for (int i = 0; i < n; ++i) {
    D[i] = a * X[i] + Y[i];
  }
}

The loop body has a forall pattern, meaning that each iteration of the loop can be executed independently and the result in each iteration is written to an independent memory location. Thus, no race conditions can appear at runtime related to array D, so no specific synchronization is needed.

The code snippet below shows an implementation that uses the OpenACC compiler directives to offload the loop to an accelerator. Note no synchronization is required to avoid race conditions and the data transfer clauses that manage the data movement between the host memory and the accelerator memory.

void example(double *D, double *X, double *Y, int n, double a) {
  #pragma acc data copyin(X[0:n], Y[0:n], a, n) copyout(D[0:n])
  #pragma acc parallel
  #pragma acc loop
  for (int i = 0; i < n; ++i) {
    D[i] = a * X[i] + Y[i];
  }
}

Related resources

• PWR055 examples at GitHub

References

• Forall pattern
• Offloading