2024-07-22
TL;DR: I wrote a C++ program that demonstrates a
general matrix multiply (GEMM) implementation for the Jetson
AGX Orin devkit. The gemm
program uses the tensor
cores available on that platform and allows for arbitrary use of the
supported input and output types (except sub-byte
types). There are no external software dependencies aside from CUDA.
The performance is at least 2x worse than cuBLAS, but the code may be
useful as a reference.
This post is a literate program. That means that
this file contains a complete program within it, along with explanatory
natural language throughout. All you need to do to get the source code
is extract the lines in all the code blocks and concatenate them. To run
the code, clone the repo
and run make
. You need nvcc
, CUDA, and Python.
The compiled binary will be in the repo root and is called
gemm
. To play with other input and output types, matrix
dimensions, transposition, and other parameters, change the
#define
s and constants in the code according to the
descriptions below.
I wrote this code as a part of Rinthy AI, which is a trio of friends interested in playing with machine learning tech on our own hardware. We split the cost of a Jetson AGX Orin development kit, and this program is meant to run exclusively on that platform—although it may run on others with little or no modification. The program runs a single general matrix multiply (GEMM) operation with user-specified dimensions and other parameters. It works as an example of how to interact with the tensor cores on the the devkit’s platform at a lower level than typical libraries.
GEMM stands for general matrix multiply. It is one of the Level 3 Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) and takes the form
where , , and are real matrices and and are real scalars. and/or may be transposed at the user’s option.
Note that appears on both sides of the assignment operator. This means that is an input and the output. We have to be careful not to overwrite the initial values in until after we’re done with them. In practice, to avoid intermediate allocations we have to compute first and then accumulate the results of into second.
I chose GEMM as the goal for this program because of its usefulness in machine learning. Developing skills with handwritten CUDA kernels that use tensor cores may be useful for future projects.
The first thing we have to do is pull in some dependencies.
cassert
, chrono
, iostream
, and
stdlib.h
are all for basic I/O, timing, and other stuff
related to the test harness rather than the kernel itself. We need
cuda.h
for any CUDA stuff to work at all, and we also need
cuda_bf16.h
so we can use the bfloat16
type, which is a variant of half-precision floating point.
mma.h
contains everything we need to interact with the
tensor cores and stands for “matrix multiply accumulate”.
#include <cassert>
#include <chrono>
#include <cuda.h>
#include <cuda_bf16.h>
#include <iostream>
#include <mma.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
using namespace std;
Here we define our inputs and outputs. The tensor cores are
modelled as special coprocessing units that perform the operations
or
.
Note that these are matrices, not elements. The tensor cores
only support a fixed set of input and output types, where
and
are considered inputs and
and
are outputs (or “accumulators”). To choose a particular input/output
type pair, we #define
a corresponding identifier. The
supported type pairs and their corresponding identifiers are listed in
the table below,1 which I have copied from here.
Input | Output | #define |
---|---|---|
half |
float |
F16_IN_F32_OUT |
half |
half |
F16_IN_OUT |
unsigned char |
int |
U8_IN_I32_OUT |
signed char |
int |
I8_IN_I32_OUT |
nv_bfloat16 |
float |
BF16_IN_F32_OUT |
tf32 |
float |
TF32_IN_F32_OUT |
double |
double |
F64_IN_OUT |
Below we select the type pair that takes signed 8-bit integers as
input and accumulates into signed 32-bit integers on the output. You can
select a different type pair by replacing the #define
.
#define I8_IN_I32_OUT
Each type pair also supports a fixed set of matrix dimensions. In the
kernel, it will be up to us to load these “tiles” in the correct order
by indexing into the given arrays.2 The supported tile
dimensions are listed in the table linked above, and their mapping to
#define
s is shown in the table below.
WMMA Dimensions (m-n-k) | #define |
---|---|
16 × 16 × 16 | MNK_16x16x16 |
32 × 8 × 16 | MNK_32x8x16 |
8 × 32 × 16 | MNK_8x32x16 |
16 × 16 × 8 | MNK_16x16x8 |
8 × 8 × 4 | MNK_8x8x4 |
In general, types that are smaller in memory allow for larger tiles.
By default, we select square tiles of 256 elements. Note that in the
MNK
notation as given by Nvidia, the
tile has dimensions
,
the
tile has dimensions
,
and the
tile has dimensions
.
#define MNK_16x16x16
We’ll need the MNK
values as individual constants later,
so we’ll use preprocessor logic to define them now. For brevity, I’ve
hidden most of the logic.3
#if defined(MNK_16x16x16)
const unsigned long WMMA_M = 16;
const unsigned long WMMA_N = 16;
const unsigned long WMMA_K = 16;
MNK
constant logic
#elif defined(MNK_32x8x16)
const unsigned long WMMA_M = 32;
const unsigned long WMMA_N = 8;
const unsigned long WMMA_K = 16;
#elif defined(MNK_8x32x16)
const unsigned long WMMA_M = 8;
const unsigned long WMMA_N = 32;
const unsigned long WMMA_K = 16;
#elif defined(MNK_16x16x8)
const unsigned long WMMA_M = 16;
const unsigned long WMMA_N = 16;
const unsigned long WMMA_K = 8;
#elif defined(MNK_8x8x4)
const unsigned long WMMA_M = 8;
const unsigned long WMMA_N = 8;
const unsigned long WMMA_K = 4;
#else
#error "No MNK setting selected"
#endif
Now we define the actual input and output types for our selected type
pair using typedef
. In all future code, we’ll use
INPUT_ELEMENT
and OUTPUT_ELEMENT
to refer to
the generic types defined here. Later we’ll also optionally check
whether or not the kernel gave the correct answer, but we need to allow
some tolerance in certain cases due to floating-point rounding error.
VERIFY_TOLERANCE
will be the maximum allowable difference
between the accepted answer for any output element and the computed
result. For our selected type pair, we’re only dealing with integers, so
the answer should be exact.
Also, it’s possible to #define
a type pair and
MNK
setting that aren’t supported together, so we check for
that using the data from the linked table. I’ve pulled out the case for
our chosen type pair and hidden the rest, since they’re not that
interesting.
#if defined(I8_IN_I32_OUT)
#define VERIFY_TOLERANCE 0
typedef signed char INPUT_ELEMENT;
typedef int OUTPUT_ELEMENT;
#if !defined(MNK_16x16x16) && !defined(MNK_32x8x16) && !defined(MNK_8x32x16)
#error "Selected WMMA dimensions are not supported for I8_IN_I32_OUT"
#endif
#elif defined(F16_IN_F32_OUT)
#define VERIFY_TOLERANCE 5
typedef half INPUT_ELEMENT;
typedef float OUTPUT_ELEMENT;
#if !defined(MNK_16x16x16) && !defined(MNK_32x8x16) && !defined(MNK_8x32x16)
#error "Selected WMMA dimensions are not supported for F16_IN_F32_OUT"
#endif
#elif defined(F16_IN_OUT)
#define VERIFY_TOLERANCE 50
typedef half INPUT_ELEMENT;
typedef half OUTPUT_ELEMENT;
#if !defined(MNK_16x16x16) && !defined(MNK_32x8x16) && !defined(MNK_8x32x16)
#error "Selected WMMA dimensions are not supported for F16_IN_OUT"
#endif
#elif defined(U8_IN_I32_OUT)
#define VERIFY_TOLERANCE 0
typedef unsigned char INPUT_ELEMENT;
typedef int OUTPUT_ELEMENT;
#if !defined(MNK_16x16x16) && !defined(MNK_32x8x16) && !defined(MNK_8x32x16)
#error "Selected WMMA dimensions are not supported for U8_IN_I32_OUT"
#endif
#elif defined(BF16_IN_F32_OUT)
#define VERIFY_TOLERANCE 10
typedef nv_bfloat16 INPUT_ELEMENT;
typedef float OUTPUT_ELEMENT;
#if !defined(MNK_16x16x16) && !defined(MNK_32x8x16) && !defined(MNK_8x32x16)
#error "Selected WMMA dimensions are not supported for BF16_IN_F32_OUT"
#endif
#elif defined(TF32_IN_F32_OUT)
#define VERIFY_TOLERANCE 5
typedef float INPUT_ELEMENT;
typedef float OUTPUT_ELEMENT;
#if !defined(MNK_16x16x8)
#error "Selected WMMA dimensions are not supported for TF32_IN_F32_OUT"
#endif
#elif defined(F64_IN_OUT)
#define VERIFY_TOLERANCE 0.005
typedef double INPUT_ELEMENT;
typedef double OUTPUT_ELEMENT;
#ifndef MNK_8x8x4
#error "Selected WMMA dimensions are not supported for F64_IN_OUT"
#endif
#else
#error "No input/output type selected"
#endif
The definition of GEMM allows the user to transpose
and/or
.
These #define
s encode that information. I originally made
these runtime constants, but the code to make it work was hard to
follow. It made more sense to make them compile-time options instead. In
an actual application, this approach might be reasonable because the
particular layout of matmuls for a given model or workload might be
known at compile time.
#define TRANSPOSE_A false
#define TRANSPOSE_B false
All matrices in this program are stored as contiguous arrays in
row-major order. This means that the dimension information is stored
separately from the data itself, and it’s on us to index into the array
properly. For convenience, let’s #define
a macro that takes
our desired 2D indices and does the indexing math for us. This makes the
code easier to read. We also have to pass y_max
, which is
the number of elements to skip forward in order to increment
y
by 1. For row-major matrices, y_max
is equal
to the number of columns in the matrix. However, as we’ll see later, we
can play with the inputs to this macro to get efficient in-place
transposition.
Note that everything is over-parenthesized because this is a macro,
and the arguments are expressions, not values. If
y_max
is something like a + b
, then without
parentheses the order of operations might not play out how we’d expect.
(This bit me during development.) To ensure that the arguments are
evaluated first, we wrap them up in parens.
#define IDX(x, y, y_max) ((x) * (y_max) + (y))
The tensor cores operate on fixed tile sizes. That presents an issue
when our input matrices have dimensions that aren’t a multiple of the
tile dimensions. This is a variant of the tile
quantization problem. We’ll solve it later by padding the inputs
with zeros up to the nearest multiples in each dimension. This macro
does that rounding up operation for us. Given some input n
and desired factor m
, this macro checks whether
n
is divisble by m
. If it is, then there’s
nothing to do, so we resolve to n
. Otherwise, we use
integer division to get the next lowest multiple of
m
, add 1, and then multiply back up by m
. As
above, we parenthesize everything.
#define RND_UP_MULT(n, m) ((n) % (m) == 0) ? (n) : (((n) / (m) + 1) * (m))
This is the control panel of the program. Aside from the
#define
s above, these constants encode everything about the
inputs to the GEMM operation. Our kernel will take some of these values
as arguments in order to properly separate it from the rest of the
program, but for this purpose it makes sense to set the values
statically.
DO_CPU_VERIFY
enables a correctness check. In the
appendix you’ll find a simple (and slow) CPU implementation of the GEMM
operation. When this constant is true
, we feed the original
inputs to this checking function and compare its results to the kernel.
On the Jetson devkit, square matrices with dimension 1000 take about one
second to evaluate on the CPU, so beyond that I turn it off.
DEBUG_OUTPUT
causes the program to print the contents of
the input and output matrices. This is useful for debugging but only
makes sense for small matrices.
const bool DO_CPU_VERIFY = false;
const bool DEBUG_OUTPUT = false;
Here we’ll define the values of and . Different type pairs need different literals, so we use preprocessor logic to make that happen. Note that the base case covers all floating point type pairs, but for those types with low precision, the given literals are usually not representable. The compiler seems to gracefully handle this by adjusting the actual values to the nearest representable one.
#if defined(U8_IN_I32_OUT)
const INPUT_ELEMENT ALPHA = 2;
const INPUT_ELEMENT BETA = 3;
#elif defined(I8_IN_I32_OUT)
const INPUT_ELEMENT ALPHA = -2;
const INPUT_ELEMENT BETA = 3;
#else
const INPUT_ELEMENT ALPHA = -1.234;
const INPUT_ELEMENT BETA = 5.678;
#endif
Now we define the sizes of the matrices. Note that matrix multiplication is undefined when the number of columns in the left matrix is not equal to the number of rows in the right matrix. This means that we can only really change three parameters here: the rows of , the columns of , and the shared “inner” dimension. Also, the dimensions of are implied by these values, too. We encode all of these constraints by assigning subsequent constants based on the earlier three literals.
const unsigned long ROWS_A = 10000;
const unsigned long COLS_A = 10000;
const unsigned long COLS_B = 10000;
const unsigned long ROWS_B = COLS_A;
const unsigned long INNER_DIM = COLS_A;
const unsigned long ROWS_C = ROWS_A;
const unsigned long COLS_C = COLS_B;
Given the dimensions of the matrices, we need to compute the padded
dimensions as well. This is to satisfy the quantization problem
discussed above. We use the RND_UP_MULT
macro to make this
easier. The desired multiples are four times the corresponding
MNK
values. The factor of four is necessary because—as
we’ll see below—every thread block is responsible for a square of 16
tiles in the output.
const unsigned long ROWS_A_PADDED = RND_UP_MULT(ROWS_A, WMMA_M * 4);
const unsigned long COLS_A_PADDED = RND_UP_MULT(COLS_A, WMMA_K * 4);
const unsigned long COLS_B_PADDED = RND_UP_MULT(COLS_B, WMMA_N * 4);
const unsigned long ROWS_B_PADDED = COLS_A_PADDED;
const unsigned long INNER_DIM_PADDED = COLS_A_PADDED;
const unsigned long ROWS_C_PADDED = ROWS_A_PADDED;
const unsigned long COLS_C_PADDED = COLS_B_PADDED;
Every kernel must define its block and grid dimensions. First, it’s
important to understand that the tensor cores operate at the warp level.
That is, all 32 threads in a warp must collaborate to execute any of the
functions in the wmma
namespace. An easy way to keep track
of that is to make the x
dimension of the block size equal
to the warp size. Thread IDs count along the x
dimension
first, so this all works out nicely.
Here’s an area where I’m slightly confused. At first, I set the
y
and z
dimensions of the block size to 1,
since that seemed like a reasonable guess. When I ran the program
through the profiler, it complained about low occupancy.
I don’t fully understand occupancy, but it seems like it’s more or less
a measure of how well the blocks fit in the streaming multiprocessors
(SMs). If occupancy is low, then the kernel isn’t using all of the SM’s
resources. I think of this kind of like packing a car. If your bags and
boxes are too big, then you can’t fill up all the available volume, but
if they’re small then you can pack more efficiently by fitting them
together.
Anyway, I played with the y
and z
dimensions for a while to increase the occupancy, and I landed on 4.
It’s almost completely arbitrary and probably not optimal, but it works
alright. The net results are that occupancy is increased, which
generally increases speed, and each block is now responsible
for 16 outputs instead of just one.
We also have to set up the grid dimensions, which need to work out so that there are exactly enough blocks to cover the entire output. This is one of many cases in this kind of programming where careful arithmetic is essential.
const unsigned int WARP_SIZE = 32;
const dim3 NUM_THREADS (WARP_SIZE,4,4);
const dim3 NUM_BLOCKS (ROWS_C_PADDED / (WMMA_M * NUM_THREADS.y),
/ (WMMA_N * NUM_THREADS.z),
COLS_C_PADDED 1);
When we run the kernel and measure its execution time, we’ll want to estimate how many operations it ran per second. To do that, we need a credible estimate for the numerator—the number of operations. We’re going to conflate multiplication and addition operations here just to keep things simple, and we’re ignoring the existence of fused multiply-add instructions, too. With those simplifications, we come to the expression below. First, we have to multiply every element of by a scalar, so that’s operations. For every element in , we know that we have to multiply pairs of elements. We also have to add them all together, which adds another operations per element of . The scalar multiplication by and the final summation each add another operations, giving a total of
I call this value the total number of “effective operations” or “eOPS”. The “e” is there to remind the reader that this value isn’t really a perfect representation of what the kernel is actually doing. It’s more like a measure of how many operations you would have to do if you were doing GEMM the naive way, such as in the CPU verification routine.
const unsigned long long TOTAL_EOPS = (ROWS_A * INNER_DIM)
+ (INNER_DIM + INNER_DIM - 1) * (ROWS_C * COLS_C)
+ 2 * (ROWS_C * COLS_C);
This program has a few utility functions. Their implementation details aren’t important for understanding the GEMM kernel, so you can find the full definitions in the appendix. Still, we have to use forward declaration to tell the compiler what signatures these functions have before we call them.
void h_gemm(
* A,
INPUT_ELEMENT* B,
INPUT_ELEMENT* C,
OUTPUT_ELEMENTunsigned long r_A,
unsigned long inner,
unsigned long c_B,
,
INPUT_ELEMENT alpha
INPUT_ELEMENT beta);
bool verify(OUTPUT_ELEMENT* h_solution, OUTPUT_ELEMENT* h_C);
template<typename ELEMENT>
void initMatrix(ELEMENT* mat, int len);
template<typename ELEMENT>
void printMat(ELEMENT* mat, int rows, int cols);
This is the code that actually runs on the GPU. Let’s examine the
function signature first. A
, B
, and
C
are pointers to arrays, and r_A
,
inner
, and c_B
represent their dimensions.
Three dimensions are enough here because A
and
B
must have equal numbers of columns and rows,
respectively, and C
must have r_A
rows and
c_B
columns. alpha
and beta
are
the scalar coefficients.
void d_gemm(
__global__ * A,
INPUT_ELEMENT* B,
INPUT_ELEMENT* C,
OUTPUT_ELEMENTunsigned long r_A,
unsigned long inner,
unsigned long c_B,
,
INPUT_ELEMENT alpha
INPUT_ELEMENT beta) {
Next we set a convenient namespace and assign some useful variables.
Most of the stuff we touch in this kernel is in the
nvcuda::wmma
namespace, so changing the namespace in just
this scope improves readability. warp_row
and
warp_col
describe what output tile this warp is responsible
for. Recall that tensor core operations need an entire warp to
cooperate, and we defined our block and grid dimensions to account for
that. These two variables tell us where the top-left corner element is
in C
. tile_run
tells us how many times we need
to move along the inner dimension to accumulate all of the contributions
from the inputs.
warp_row
/warp_col
and the
output matrix. Note that these values are just offsets along their
corresponding dimensions, so they encode the first row or
column covered by the current warp. Together, they uniquely point to the
top-left element of the output tile. Each output tile is
WMMA_M
by WMMA_N
elements. I emphasize all
this because it’s easy to get confused between tiles and elements.
If this is confusing, it may help to remember that while this implementation does use the tensor cores, it’s still more or less a naive CUDA matmul. We’re still doing dot products over the rows and columns of the inputs. The big difference is that the “elements” of the matmul are now these multi-element tiles. If you’re familiar with element-wise tiling, this is basically the same thing but with different function calls.
using namespace nvcuda::wmma;
int warp_row = (blockIdx.x * blockDim.y + threadIdx.y) * WMMA_M;
int warp_col = (blockIdx.y * blockDim.z + threadIdx.z) * WMMA_N;
int tile_run = inner / WMMA_K;
The tensor core API requires that we load data into
fragment
s, which are opaque structures that contain some
matrix elements to be used in an operation. We have to explicitly
declare which kind of matrix a fragment contains in the matmul operation
(matrix_a
, matrix_b
, or
accumulator
), as well as how big the fragment is, what type
the elements are, and how to index the source matrices
(row_major
or col_major
). That last bit gives
us a convenient way to accomplish transposition. If the corresponding
input matrix is supposed to be transposed, we declare the fragment as
col_major
, even though the underlying data is in row-major
order. The accumulator
fragment is not affected by
transposition.
We also define an index expression that accounts for the
transposition. Note that the x
and y
arguments
to IDX
are flipped, and also we refer to an undeclared
variable i
. When we use this macro in a loop below, the
i
variable will contain the inner dimension position.
At the top of this block, we also have to optionally change the
fragment type when using tf32
. The reason is that
tf32
seems to act more or less like a passthrough type for
float
, even though the bits are different. According to the
Nvidia
docs, you have to pass this alternate type to the fragments in order
to get the benefits of tf32
on the tensor cores. I’m not
certain I’m doing this right, since the docs also mention
__float_to_tf32
, which I can’t find anywhere else online,
and which I haven’t used in this kernel. In all other cases, the actual
input type is sufficient.
#if defined(TF32_IN_F32_OUT)
#define FRAGMENT_TYPE precision::tf32
#else
#define FRAGMENT_TYPE INPUT_ELEMENT
#endif
#if TRANSPOSE_A
<matrix_a, WMMA_M, WMMA_N, WMMA_K, FRAGMENT_TYPE, col_major> A_frag;
fragment#define IDX_A IDX(i * WMMA_K, warp_row, inner)
#else
<matrix_a, WMMA_M, WMMA_N, WMMA_K, FRAGMENT_TYPE, row_major> A_frag;
fragment#define IDX_A IDX(warp_row, i * WMMA_K, inner)
#endif
#if TRANSPOSE_B
<matrix_b, WMMA_M, WMMA_N, WMMA_K, FRAGMENT_TYPE, col_major> B_frag;
fragment#define IDX_B IDX(warp_col, i * WMMA_K, c_B)
#else
<matrix_b, WMMA_M, WMMA_N, WMMA_K, FRAGMENT_TYPE, row_major> B_frag;
fragment#define IDX_B IDX(i * WMMA_K, warp_col, c_B)
#endif
<accumulator, WMMA_M, WMMA_N, WMMA_K, OUTPUT_ELEMENT> C_frag; fragment
We’ll begin in earnest by loading the output tile into the
accumulator
fragment and scaling it by beta
.
load_matrix_sync
takes the target fragment, a pointer to
the top-left element, the leading dimension (number of columns in
C
, in this case), and the storage layout. It coordinates
all of the threads in the warp to do the load from global memory
sync
hronously. Then, we iterate over each element and scale
by beta
.4 We do this before the matmul because
we’re going to accumulate partial results in C_frag
, which
would make it impossible to scale just the original values by
beta
later on.
(C_frag, C + IDX(warp_row, warp_col, c_B), c_B, mem_row_major);
load_matrix_syncfor (int i = 0; i < C_frag.num_elements; i++) {
#if defined(F16_IN_F32_OUT)
.x[i] *= __half2float(beta);
C_frag#elif defined(BF16_IN_F32_OUT)
.x[i] *= __bfloat162float(beta);
C_frag#else
.x[i] *= beta;
C_frag#endif
}
Just like an ordinary matrix multiplication, we walk along the inner
dimension, multiplying and accumulating tiles as we go. We also scale
the elements in the tile from A
by alpha
.
mma_sync
runs the multiply-add operation over the last
three arguments and accumulates the result in the first argument. It
also supports “in-place” operation, where the first and last arguments
are the same. At the end of the outer loop, C_frag
contains
the correct GEMM outputs for this warp’s tile.
IDX_A
and IDX_B
are macros, so the
preprocessor replaces them with their definitions before compilation.
These definitions include the variable i
, which is
incrementing along the inner dimension in units of WMMA_K
.
The macros convert this value into the correct offset in the
corresponding matrix. Note that the indices are shown as offsets from
the left-most column / top row, but actually they’re the offsets to the
top-left elements of the current tiles.
for (int i = 0; i < tile_run; i++) {
(A_frag, A + IDX_A, inner);
load_matrix_sync(B_frag, B + IDX_B, c_B);
load_matrix_syncfor (int i = 0; i < A_frag.num_elements; i++) {
.x[i] *= alpha;
A_frag}
(C_frag, A_frag, B_frag, C_frag);
mma_sync}
Finally, we call another warp-level function to store the values of
C_frag
into the correct location in C
, which
is ultimately a store operation into global memory.
(C + IDX(warp_row, warp_col, c_B), C_frag, c_B, mem_row_major);
store_matrix_sync}
Now we come to the entry point of the program. Everything from here on is more or less just a test harness for the kernel we saw above.
int main() {
For convenience in testing, we begin by printing out some information about the GEMM operation we’re about to run. We also check that the dimensions of the blocks and grids match the number of elements in the output matrix. It’s easy to get these wrong because reasoning about all the different loops and dimensions is often difficult. This runtime check catches a decent number of errors in this category.
To allocate memory for our three matrices, we need to know their sizes in bytes. We’ll compute those values now by finding the number of elements for each matrix and then multiplying that value by the number of bytes per element. We also print the dimensions and sizes of the matrices.
It’s useful to know the arithmetic intensity of the computation, which is the ratio of the total number of math operations to the total number of bytes that need to move during the computation. This figure gives some insight into whether or not the computation will be limited by the compute performance or memory bandwidth of the target platform.
The code in this area is somewhat verbose and not at all interesting, so I’ve hidden it.
#if defined(F16_IN_F32_OUT) || defined(F16_IN_OUT)
("ALPHA : %6f\n", __half2float(ALPHA));
printf("BETA : %6f\n\n", __half2float(BETA));
printf#elif defined(BF16_IN_F32_OUT)
("ALPHA : %6f\n", __bfloat162float(ALPHA));
printf("BETA : %6f\n\n", __bfloat162float(BETA));
printf#elif defined(U8_IN_I32_OUT) || defined(I8_IN_I32_OUT)
("ALPHA : %6d\n", ALPHA);
printf("BETA : %6d\n\n", BETA);
printf#else
("ALPHA : %6f\n", ALPHA);
printf("BETA : %6f\n\n", BETA);
printf#endif
("TRANSPOSE_A : %s\n", TRANSPOSE_A ? "true" : "false");
printf("TRANSPOSE_B : %s\n\n", TRANSPOSE_B ? "true" : "false");
printf
("WMMA_M : %3lu\n", WMMA_M);
printf("WMMA_N : %3lu\n", WMMA_N);
printf("WMMA_K : %3lu\n\n", WMMA_K);
printf
("NUM_BLOCKS : (%3d, %3d, %3d) = %5d\n",
printf.x,
NUM_BLOCKS.y,
NUM_BLOCKS.z,
NUM_BLOCKS.x * NUM_BLOCKS.y * NUM_BLOCKS.z
NUM_BLOCKS);
("NUM_THREADS : (%3d, %3d, %3d) = %5d\n\n",
printf.x,
NUM_THREADS.y,
NUM_THREADS.z,
NUM_THREADS.x * NUM_THREADS.y * NUM_THREADS.z
NUM_THREADS);
#if defined(F16_IN_OUT)
("Type: : F16_IN_OUT\n\n");
printf#elif defined(F16_IN_F32_OUT)
("Type : F16_IN_F32_OUT\n\n");
printf#elif defined(U8_IN_I32_OUT)
("Type : U8_IN_I32_OUT\n\n");
printf#elif defined(I8_IN_I32_OUT)
("Type : I8_IN_I32_OUT\n\n");
printf#elif defined(BF16_IN_F32_OUT)
("Type : BF16_IN_F32_OUT\n\n");
printf#elif defined(TF32_IN_F32_OUT)
("Type : TF32_IN_F32_OUT\n\n");
printf#elif defined(F64_IN_OUT)
("Type : F64_IN_OUT\n\n");
printf#elif defined(U4_IN_I32_OUT)
("Type : U4_IN_I32_OUT\n\n");
printf#elif defined(S4_IN_I32_OUT)
("Type : S4_IN_I32_OUT\n\n");
printf#elif defined(B1_IN_I32_OUT)
("Type : B1_IN_I32_OUT\n\n");
printf#endif
size_t SIZE_A = ROWS_A * COLS_A * sizeof(INPUT_ELEMENT);
(
printf"A original : %5lu × %5lu, %lu B => %9lu B\n",
,
ROWS_A,
COLS_Asizeof(INPUT_ELEMENT),
SIZE_A);
size_t SIZE_A_PADDED = ROWS_A_PADDED * COLS_A_PADDED * sizeof(INPUT_ELEMENT);
(
printf" padded : %5lu × %5lu, %lu B => %9lu B\n",
,
ROWS_A_PADDED,
COLS_A_PADDEDsizeof(INPUT_ELEMENT),
SIZE_A_PADDED);
size_t SIZE_B = ROWS_B * COLS_B * sizeof(INPUT_ELEMENT);
(
printf"B original : %5lu × %5lu, %lu B => %9lu B\n",
,
ROWS_B,
COLS_Bsizeof(INPUT_ELEMENT),
SIZE_B);
size_t SIZE_B_PADDED = ROWS_B_PADDED * COLS_B_PADDED * sizeof(INPUT_ELEMENT);
(
printf" padded : %5lu × %5lu, %lu B => %9lu B\n",
,
ROWS_B_PADDED,
COLS_B_PADDEDsizeof(INPUT_ELEMENT),
SIZE_B_PADDED);
size_t SIZE_C = ROWS_C * COLS_C * sizeof(OUTPUT_ELEMENT);
(
printf"C original : %5lu × %5lu, %lu B => %9lu B\n",
,
ROWS_C,
COLS_Csizeof(OUTPUT_ELEMENT),
SIZE_C);
size_t SIZE_C_PADDED = ROWS_C_PADDED * COLS_C_PADDED * sizeof(OUTPUT_ELEMENT);
(
printf" padded : %5lu × %5lu, %lu B => %9lu B\n\n",
,
ROWS_C_PADDED,
COLS_C_PADDEDsizeof(OUTPUT_ELEMENT),
SIZE_C_PADDED);
size_t TOTAL_SIZE = SIZE_A + SIZE_B + SIZE_C;
("Total eOPS : %13llu\n", TOTAL_EOPS);
printf("Input size : %13lu B\n", SIZE_A + SIZE_B);
printf("Output size : %13lu B\n", SIZE_C);
printf(
printf"eOPS per byte: %13f\n\n",
static_cast<double>(TOTAL_EOPS) / static_cast<double>(TOTAL_SIZE)
);
assert(
.x * NUM_THREADS.y * WMMA_N
NUM_BLOCKS* NUM_BLOCKS.y * NUM_THREADS.z * WMMA_M
== ROWS_C_PADDED * COLS_C_PADDED
);
Now we’ll set the random seed to a fixed value so we always get the same element values for a given configuration. This eliminates a source of random variation in performance and makes debugging less frustrating.
(0); srand
Now we allocate memory for A
, B
, and
C
and initialize them to random values. Note our use of
INPUT_ELEMENT
and OUTPUT_ELEMENT
in the calls
to initMatrix
, which tells the compiler to generate
function implementations for those specific types using the template
defined elsewhere.
* h_A = (INPUT_ELEMENT*)malloc(SIZE_A);
INPUT_ELEMENT<INPUT_ELEMENT>(h_A, ROWS_A * COLS_A);
initMatrix* h_B = (INPUT_ELEMENT*)malloc(SIZE_B);
INPUT_ELEMENT<INPUT_ELEMENT>(h_B, ROWS_B * COLS_B);
initMatrix* h_C = (OUTPUT_ELEMENT*)malloc(SIZE_C);
OUTPUT_ELEMENT<OUTPUT_ELEMENT>(h_C, ROWS_C * COLS_C); initMatrix
The tensor cores do fast matrix multiplications, but they only
operate on inputs and outputs with fixed dimensions
(WMMA_M
, WMMA_N
, and WMMA_K
). If
our input matrices A
and B
have dimensions
that aren’t multiples of the corresponding tensor core sizes, then we’re
going to end up missing the “extra” values that sit outside the last
tiles. We can’t just run for an extra tile to get those values because
we’d end up reading values from beginnings of the next rows and
exceeding the boundaries of the matrices on the last rows. Instead, we
need to allocate padded versions of the matrices with dimensions that
are a multiple of the tensor core dimensions and fill the
unneeded values with zeros so they don’t affect the computation. Then,
after the kernel is done running, we’ll need to extract the values we
want from the output to get the true result.5
* h_A_padded = (INPUT_ELEMENT*)malloc(SIZE_A_PADDED);
INPUT_ELEMENT* h_B_padded = (INPUT_ELEMENT*)malloc(SIZE_B_PADDED);
INPUT_ELEMENT* h_C_padded = (OUTPUT_ELEMENT*)malloc(SIZE_C_PADDED); OUTPUT_ELEMENT
We want the padded matrices to have identical values to the unpadded
ones where they’re defined and zeros elsewhere. The logic below
accomplishes that for h_A_padded
, and I’ve hidden the rest
because it’s the same thing with different pointers and iteration
boundaries. We also time this operation and print the duration. For size
10,000 square matrices and I8_IN_I32_OUT
, this takes about
115 ms on the Jetson’s CPU.
Rather than touch every element individually, this logic uses
memcpy
to grab an entire row of the unpadded matrix and
copy it to the padded version. Then, it fills in zeros in the remaining
columns. For any extra rows, separate logic fills one row with zeros and
then memcpy
s those as needed.
::steady_clock::time_point start = chrono::steady_clock::now();
chronofor (int r = 0; r < ROWS_A; r++) {
(
memcpy+ IDX(r, 0, COLS_A_PADDED),
h_A_padded + IDX(r, 0, COLS_A),
h_A * sizeof(INPUT_ELEMENT)
COLS_A );
for (int c = COLS_A; c < COLS_A_PADDED; c++) {
[IDX(r, c, COLS_A_PADDED)] = static_cast<INPUT_ELEMENT>(0);
h_A_padded}
}
for (int c = 0; c < COLS_A_PADDED; c++) {
[IDX(ROWS_A, c, COLS_A_PADDED)] = 0;
h_A_padded}
for (int r = ROWS_A + 1; r < ROWS_A_PADDED; r++) {
(
memcpy+ IDX(r, 0, COLS_A_PADDED),
h_A_padded + IDX(ROWS_A, 0, COLS_A_PADDED),
h_A_padded * sizeof(INPUT_ELEMENT)
COLS_A_PADDED );
}
for (int r = 0; r < ROWS_B_PADDED; r++) {
(
memcpy+ IDX(r, 0, COLS_B_PADDED),
h_B_padded + IDX(r, 0, COLS_B),
h_B * sizeof(INPUT_ELEMENT)
COLS_B );
for (int c = COLS_B; c < COLS_B_PADDED; c++) {
[IDX(r, c, COLS_B_PADDED)] = static_cast<INPUT_ELEMENT>(0);
h_B_padded}
}
for (int c = 0; c < COLS_B_PADDED; c++) {
[IDX(ROWS_B, c, COLS_B_PADDED)] = 0;
h_B_padded}
for (int r = ROWS_B + 1; r < ROWS_B_PADDED; r++) {
(
memcpy+ IDX(r, 0, COLS_B_PADDED),
h_B_padded + IDX(ROWS_B, 0, COLS_B_PADDED),
h_B_padded * sizeof(INPUT_ELEMENT)
COLS_B_PADDED );
}
for (int r = 0; r < ROWS_C_PADDED; r++) {
(
memcpy+ IDX(r, 0, COLS_C_PADDED),
h_C_padded + IDX(r, 0, COLS_C),
h_C * sizeof(OUTPUT_ELEMENT)
COLS_C );
for (int c = COLS_C; c < COLS_C_PADDED; c++) {
[IDX(r, c, COLS_C_PADDED)] = static_cast<OUTPUT_ELEMENT>(0);
h_C_padded}
}
for (int c = 0; c < COLS_C_PADDED; c++) {
[IDX(ROWS_C, c, COLS_C_PADDED)] = 0;
h_C_padded}
for (int r = ROWS_C + 1; r < ROWS_C_PADDED; r++) {
(
memcpy+ IDX(r, 0, COLS_C_PADDED),
h_C_padded + IDX(ROWS_C, 0, COLS_C_PADDED),
h_C_padded * sizeof(INPUT_ELEMENT)
COLS_C_PADDED );
}
::steady_clock::time_point end = chrono::steady_clock::now();
chronounsigned long pad_elapsed = chrono::duration_cast<chrono::microseconds>(end - start).count();
("Padding : %13lu μs\n\n", pad_elapsed); printf
If we’re going to do CPU verification later, then we need an original
copy of the C
matrix so we can run GEMM a second time. The
GEMM operation modifies C
in the general case, so running
the kernel changes the values in h_C
after copying them
back from the GPU. We’ll save a copy of the original values in
h_C_orig
. We don’t actually need to do this unless
DO_CPU_VERIFY
is true
, but adding the extra
logic to handle conditionally allocating and freeing the memory isn’t
worth the benefit in my opinion, so we just do it every time.
* h_C_orig = (OUTPUT_ELEMENT*)malloc(SIZE_C);
OUTPUT_ELEMENT(h_C_orig, h_C, SIZE_C); memcpy
If DEBUG_OUTPUT
is true
, then we’ll print
the initial contents of A
, B
, and
C
. The printMat
function is generic over the
element type—just like initMatrix
above—and prints the
matrix elements in a format that can be easily copied into a Python
REPL.
if (DEBUG_OUTPUT) {
("A = ");
printf<INPUT_ELEMENT>(h_A, ROWS_A, COLS_A);
printMat("B = ");
printf<INPUT_ELEMENT>(h_B, ROWS_B, COLS_B);
printMat("C = ");
printf<OUTPUT_ELEMENT>(h_C, ROWS_C, COLS_C);
printMat}
The inputs are allocated and initialized on the CPU, but to do the GEMM operation we need to move them to the GPU. CUDA has functions in its API for handling this.
* d_A;
INPUT_ELEMENT(&d_A, SIZE_A_PADDED);
cudaMalloc* d_B;
INPUT_ELEMENT(&d_B, SIZE_B_PADDED);
cudaMalloc* d_C;
OUTPUT_ELEMENT(&d_C, SIZE_C_PADDED);
cudaMalloc
(d_A, h_A_padded, SIZE_A_PADDED, cudaMemcpyHostToDevice);
cudaMemcpy(d_B, h_B_padded, SIZE_B_PADDED, cudaMemcpyHostToDevice);
cudaMemcpy(d_C, h_C_padded, SIZE_C_PADDED, cudaMemcpyHostToDevice); cudaMemcpy
We’re almost ready. If we were to launch the kernel now, we might accidentally include the device initialization in our speed measurement. We can avoid that by initializing the device explicitly now.
(0, cudaDeviceScheduleAuto, 0); cudaInitDevice
We’re finally done setting up. We can launch the kernel and measure
the time it takes to execute. We pass NUM_BLOCKS
and
NUM_THREADS
as the launch parameters, and we pass device
pointers and other constants as arguments to the kernel. The call to
cudaDeviceSynchronize
guarantees that the GPU will finish
its most recent kernel before advancing to the next line. Normally, CPU
execution continues after a kernel launch—which is the point of having a
GPU at all—and that’s usually the desired behavior. In this case, we
want to block on the kernel’s execution because we’re trying to
measure how long it takes to run.
= chrono::steady_clock::now();
start <<<NUM_BLOCKS,NUM_THREADS>>>(
d_gemm,
d_A,
d_B,
d_C,
ROWS_A_PADDED,
INNER_DIM_PADDED,
COLS_B_PADDED,
ALPHA
BETA);
();
cudaDeviceSynchronize= chrono::steady_clock::now(); end
Now we’ll get the number of microseconds between the start and end of the kernel’s runtime and then report its effective speed.
long d_elapsed = chrono::duration_cast<chrono::microseconds>(end - start).count();
double eops = static_cast<double>(TOTAL_EOPS) / (static_cast<double>(d_elapsed) / 1e6);
("Device : %13lu μs (%11f eTOPS)\n", d_elapsed, eops / 1e12); printf
To complete the operation—and to optionally check its correctness—we need to copy the result back to the CPU and undo the padding operation we did earlier. This logic is a lot simpler than the initial padding. We’ll also measure and report its duration a little further down. For the case I mentioned above, the total execution time is about 50 ms on the CPU.
(h_C_padded, d_C, SIZE_C_PADDED, cudaMemcpyDeviceToHost);
cudaMemcpy= chrono::steady_clock::now();
start for (int r = 0; r < ROWS_C; r++) {
(
memcpy+ IDX(r, 0, COLS_C),
h_C + IDX(r, 0, COLS_C_PADDED),
h_C_padded * sizeof(OUTPUT_ELEMENT)
COLS_C );
}
= chrono::steady_clock::now();
end unsigned long extract_elapsed = chrono::duration_cast<chrono::microseconds>(end - start).count();
If the corresponding constants are enabled, then we’ll print out the matrix contents and/or run the CPU version of GEMM to check our results from the GPU. For comparison, it’s also fun to measure the runtime of the naive CPU implementation to see how much faster the GPU is.
if (DEBUG_OUTPUT) {
("h_C after device computation:\n");
printf<OUTPUT_ELEMENT>(h_C, ROWS_C, COLS_C);
printMat}
if (DO_CPU_VERIFY) {
= chrono::steady_clock::now();
start (h_A, h_B, h_C_orig, ROWS_A, INNER_DIM, COLS_B, ALPHA, BETA);
h_gemm= chrono::steady_clock::now();
end unsigned long h_elapsed = chrono::duration_cast<chrono::microseconds>(end - start).count();
(
printf"Host : %13lu μs (%11f eTOPS)",
,
h_elapsed(static_cast<double>(TOTAL_EOPS) / (static_cast<double>(h_elapsed) / 1e6)) / 1e12
);
if (DEBUG_OUTPUT) {
("CPU result:\n");
printf<OUTPUT_ELEMENT>(h_C_orig, ROWS_C, COLS_C);
printMat}
if (verify(h_C_orig, h_C)) {
(" CORRECT\n\n");
printf} else {
(" WRONG\n\n");
printf}
} else {
("Host : skipped\n\n");
printf}
("Extraction : %13lu μs\n", extract_elapsed); printf
We’ve done what we came here to do. All we really need to do now is return zero, but it doesn’t hurt to deallocate all of the memory we’ve been using. I think the operating system would take care of this for us after the process terminates, but for completeness we might as well do it ourselves.
(h_A);
free(h_B);
free(h_C);
free(h_C_orig);
free(d_A);
cudaFree(d_B);
cudaFree(d_C);
cudaFree
return 0;
}
I spent a lot of late nights learning about optimization techniques
for this kernel and trying to implement them. (It was not healthy.) I
became reluctant friends with ncu
and Nsight Compute, the
profiling tools for CUDA kernels. All I can say for sure after all that
work is that I have only begun to understand a small fraction of what’s
out there. But, I’m told this is a good sign because it means I’ve left
the safety of the Dunning-Kruger
effect.
As written, d_gemm
does not make optimal use of the
resources on the Jetson. In particular, it seems to be memory-bound,
which makes sense to me because the kernel is constantly loading tiles
from global memory, and adjacent warps are loading the same
tiles from A
and B
. I tried doing a
“tiling of tiles” with shared memory, but aside from a lot of headaches
with indexing, I didn’t get too far. I never wrote a correct
implementation, but once my best attempt started getting close, it
became clear that it wasn’t going to be faster.
There is definitely room for improvement, but it’s notable that
cuBLAS runs SGEMM (single-precision GEMM) at about 1.7 eTOPS, while this
implementation gets about 0.8 eTOPS (~47%) with
TF32_IN_F32_OUT
. I don’t know if that’s a fair comparison,
but it’s probably somewhat reasonable. I’m happy with ready
to accept 2x headroom for this project, since it’s nominally about
learning (like all my projects).
Notably, transposition seems to make a big difference in performance.
When TRANSPOSE_B
is true
, the performance for
I8_IN_I32_OUT
increases by about 3x. As with other
implementations, I guess this is due to improved coalescing / cache
performance when reading B
as rows instead of columns. I
definitely don’t understand how to make optimal use of this yet.
If I do come back to this in the future to apply optimizations, I’ll probably start by trying to understand what cuBLAS does that’s so much faster. It seems more likely that when I get back around to playing with GPUs again, I’ll want to use my basic CUDA knowledge to work on a different kernel where custom code is valuable, such as fusion of otherwise discrete kernels to save on memory traffic.
These are the definitions of the utility functions that we declared above.
Note that initMatrix
and printMat
are both
templates over a generic ELEMENT
. This is necessary because
INPUT_ELEMENT
and OUTPUT_ELEMENT
are usually
different, so we would usually need two different function signatures.
The template syntax lets us avoid code duplication by specifying the
type we want at the call site and telling the compiler to figure out the
rest.
h_gemm
void h_gemm(
* A,
INPUT_ELEMENT* B,
INPUT_ELEMENT* C,
OUTPUT_ELEMENTunsigned long r_A,
unsigned long inner,
unsigned long c_B,
,
INPUT_ELEMENT alpha
INPUT_ELEMENT beta) {
This is a naive nested for
loop matrix multiplication.
There’s no need to be fancy here. In fact, in this case it’s better if
everything is a little boring because then it’s easier to prove that
it’s correct. High confidence in correctness is useful here because
we’re depending on this function to tell us if our kernel code is
right.
For every output element, we first scale the existing value by
beta
. (Recall that in GEMM we accumulate the result into
C
, which already has arbitrary values in it.) Then, we do a
dot product of the corresponding row in A
and the
corresponding column in B
. We have to account for
transposition of both inputs, but that can be done easily by swapping
the arguments to the IDX
macro. Finally, we scale the
result by alpha
and accumulate it into C
.
This function is only called when DO_CPU_VERIFY
is
true
. For large matrices, this takes a long time.
, b;
INPUT_ELEMENT afor (int row = 0; row < r_A; row++) {
for (int col = 0; col < c_B; col++) {
#if defined(F16_IN_F32_OUT)
[IDX(row, col, c_B)] *= __half2float(beta);
C#elif defined(BF16_IN_F32_OUT)
[IDX(row, col, c_B)] *= __bfloat162float(beta);
C#else
[IDX(row, col, c_B)] *= beta;
C#endif
for (int offset = 0; offset < inner; offset++) {
#if TRANSPOSE_A
= A[IDX(offset, row, inner)];
a #else
= A[IDX(row, offset, inner)];
a #endif
#if TRANSPOSE_B
= B[IDX(col, offset, c_B)];
b #else
= B[IDX(offset, col, c_B)];
b #endif
#if defined(F16_IN_F32_OUT)
[IDX(row, col, c_B)] += __half2float(alpha * a * b);
C#elif defined(BF16_IN_F32_OUT)
[IDX(row, col, c_B)] += __bfloat162float(alpha * a * b);
C#else
[IDX(row, col, c_B)] += alpha * a * b;
C#endif
}
}
}
}
verify
Given two matrices, check whether the second one (h_C
)
is equal to the first one (h_solution
) within some
tolerance. If a mismatch appears, print it out and return
false
. Otherwise, return true
. For integer
types, the tolerance is 0
, but it’s nonzero for floating
point types because of the possibility of accumulated
error. We don’t need to know the dimensions of each matrix because
this function should only operate on the output matrix C
.
The dimensions of C
are stored in constants
ROWS_C
and COLS_C
, so we use those directly.
We need to supply different strings to printf
in the
mismatch case because different output types require different conversion
specifications.
bool verify(OUTPUT_ELEMENT* h_solution, OUTPUT_ELEMENT* h_C) {
for (int idx = 0; idx < ROWS_C * COLS_C; idx++) {
#if defined(F16_IN_OUT)
if (__hgt(__habs(h_C[idx] - h_solution[idx]), VERIFY_TOLERANCE)) {
#else
if (abs(h_C[idx] - h_solution[idx]) > VERIFY_TOLERANCE) {
#endif
(
printf#if defined(U8_IN_I32_OUT) || defined(I8_IN_I32_OUT)
"Found output mismatch at (%lu,%lu): device returned %d but solution is %d\n",
#else
"Found output mismatch at (%lu,%lu): device returned %f but solution is %f\n",
#endif
/ COLS_C,
idx % COLS_C,
idx #if defined(F16_IN_OUT)
(h_C[idx]),
__half2float(h_solution[idx])
__half2float#elif defined(BF16_IN_F32_OUT)
(h_C[idx]),
__bfloat162float(h_solution[idx])
__bfloat162float#else
[idx],
h_C[idx]
h_solution#endif
);
return false;
}
}
return true;
}
initMatrix
Nothing special here. Just loop over all of the elements in the array
and choose a rand
om
value for each one. We use the modulo operator to keep the values
between 0
and 16
. As long as the generic
ELEMENT
supports casting from int
, we’re all
good. Note that we don’t need to care about the fact that the input is
actually a matrix. Since the elements are stored as a contiguous
sequence in memory, the dimensionality doesn’t matter as long as we
touch all the elements and don’t overrun. We depend on the caller to
give us the right value of len
, which should be the product
of the dimensions.
template<typename ELEMENT>
void initMatrix(ELEMENT* mat, int len) {
for (int idx = 0; idx < len; idx++) {
[idx] = static_cast<ELEMENT>(rand() % 16);
mat}
}
printMat
Print the contents of the supplied matrix in a way that can be copied
and pasted into a Python REPL. This means that the whole matrix and each
row must be surrounded by []
and the elements and rows must
be separated by a comma. We loop over the rows and colums, emitting
characters and elements as necessary to satisfy these requirements. As
with verify
above, different printf
calls are
needed depending on the type.
This function is only called when DEBUG_OUTPUT
is
true
. For large matrices, this produces a lot of
output.
template<typename ELEMENT>
void printMat(ELEMENT* mat, int rows, int cols) {
("[");
printffor (int r = 0; r < rows; r++) {
("[");
printffor (int c = 0; c < cols; c++) {
#if defined(F64_IN_OUT)
("%f,", mat[r * rows + c]);
printf#elif defined(U8_IN_I32_OUT)
("%d,", mat[r * rows + c]);
printf#endif
}
("],");
printfif (r != rows - 1) {
("\n");
printf}
}
("]\n");
printf}
The tensor cores support additional type pairs where the inputs are less than one byte wide. They are supported on an experimental basis and aren’t that interesting to me, so I didn’t implement them here. Some interesting extra operations are also supported for these types.↩︎
If you’re already familiar with matmul tiling, the tensor cores allow you to do the same thing but faster. In other words, using the tensor cores is more or less like getting a tiled matmul for free.↩︎
It may seem strange that we’re using
unsigned long
for such small constant values. In fact,
you’ll see this throughout the program. The only reason I’ve done this
is to make things easier when computing large values, such as the number
of eOPS in the overall operation or the number of bytes in an input
matrix. If I declared these values as int
or similar, I’d
have to worry about rollover, but this way I can avoid all that. I don’t
know whether or not this affects performance, but I doubt it.↩︎
It’s just occuring to me now that
this might not make sense. Each thread in the warp is going to run this
for
loop, so it seems like the scaling should be done
multiple times per element, which isn’t what we want. The kernel’s
output matches against h_gemm
, so maybe the compiler is
smart enough to see what we’re doing and parallelize it across the warp.
Or maybe I’m wrong about this being a problem at all.↩︎
It would be better to do this padding in the kernels because the time spent padding would be parallelized. I haven’t bothered to do that here, and I think it requires some nontrivial changes. I’m not sure how to handle the padded tiles if the given device array doesn’t have enough capacity for them.↩︎