swCUDA: Auto parallel code translation framework from CUDA to ATHREAD for new generation sunway supercomputer

• Published in: CCF transactions on high performance computing (Online) 2024-08, Vol.6 (4), p.439-458
• Main Authors: Yu, Maoxue, Ma, Guanghao, Wang, Zhuoya, Tang, Shuai, Chen, Yuhu, Wang, Yucheng, Liu, Yuanyuan, Jia, Dongning, Wei, Zhiqiang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Algorithms; Computer architecture; Computer Hardware; Computer Science; Computer Systems Organization and Communication Networks; Design; Graphics processing units; Programming languages; Random access; Regular Paper; Supercomputers; Syntax
• ISSN: 2524-4922; 2524-4930
• DOI: 10.1007/s42514-023-00159-7

Since specific hardware characteristics and low-level programming model are adapted to both NVIDIA GPU and new generation Sunway architecture, automatically translating mature CUDA kernels to Sunway ATHREAD kernels are realistic but challenging work. To address this issue, swCUDA , an auto parallel code translation framework is proposed. To that end, we create scale affine translation to transform CUDA thread hierarchy to Sunway index, directive based memory hierarchy and data redirection optimization to assign optimal memory usage and data stride strategy, directive based grouping-calculation-asynchronous-reduction (GCAR) algorithm to provide general solution for random access issue. swCUDA utilizes code generator ANTLR as compiler frontend to parse CUDA kernel and integrate novel algorithms in the node of abstracted syntax tree (AST) depending on directives. Automatically translation is performed on the entire Polybench suite and NBody simulation benchmark. We get an average 40x speedup compared with baseline on the Sunway architecture, average speedup of 15x compared to x86 CPU and average 27 percentage higher than NVIDIA GPU. Further, swCUDA is implemented to translate major kernels of the real world application Gromacs. The translated version achieves up to 17x speedup.