Semi-automatic Tool to Ease the Creation and Optimization of GPU Programs

We present a tool that reduces the development time of GPU-executable code. We implement a catalogue of common optimizations specific to the GPU architecture. Through the tool, the programmer can semi-automatically transform a computationally-intensive code section into GPU-executable form and apply optimizations thereto. Based on experiments, the code generated by the tool can be 3-256X faster than code generated by an OpenACC compiler, 4-37X faster than optimized CPU code, and attain up to 25% of peak performance of the GPU. We found that by using pattern-matching rules, many of the transformations can be performed automatically, which makes the tool usable for both novices and experts in GPU programming.