New Technique to Reduce Register File Accesses in GPUs

Background

Graphics processing units (GPU) or graphics cards create images on a variety of display devices ranging from phones to gaming systems.  The register file (RF) is a critical structure in GPUs.  To  simplify  the  architecture  of  the  RF, it is organized in a multi-bank configuration with a single port for  each  bank.  The  frequent  accesses  to the register file during kernel execution incur a sizeable overhead in GPU power consumption, and introduce delays as accesses are serialized when port conflicts occur.

Brief Description

Prof. Nael Ghazaleh and Hodjat Asghari Esfeden from the University of California, Riverside have developed Breathing Operand Windows (BOW), an enhanced GPU pipeline and operand collector technique that supports bypassing register file accesses and instead passes values directly between instructions within the same window. While this baseline design can only bypass register reads, they also introduce an improved design capable of bypassing unnecessary write operations to the RF. Compiler optimizations help guide the write-back destination of operands depending on whether they will be reused to further reduce the write traffic.

The BOW microarchitecture reduces RF dynamic energy consumption by 55%, while at the same time increases overall performance by 11%, with a modest overhead of 12KB of additional storage which is ~4% of the RF size.

Application

New GPU microarchitecture to increase GPU performance and reduce energy consumption by reducing register file accesses.

Patent Status

Related Materials

• Esfeden, Hodjat Asghari, Amirali Abdolrashidi, Shafiur Rahman, Daniel Wong, and Nael Abu-Ghazaleh. "BOW: Breathing Operand Windows to Exploit Bypassing in GPUs." In Proceedings of the 53rd IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO'20). 2020. - 10/19/2020