Recent characterizations of data movement performance have evaluated optimizations for dense and blocked accesses used by accelerators like GPUs and Xeon Phi, but sparse access patterns like scatter and gather are still not well understood across current and emerging architectures. We propose a tunable benchmark suite , Spatter, that allows users to characterize scatter, gather , and related sparse access patterns at a low level across multiple backends, including CUDA, OpenCL, and OpenMP. Spatter also allows users to vary the block size and amount of data that is moved to create a more comprehensive picture of sparse access patterns and to model patternsthat are found in real applications. With Spatter we aim to characterize the performance of memory systems in a novel way by evaluating how the density of accesses compares against real-world effective memory bandwidths (measured by STREAM) and how it can be compared across widely varying architectures including GPUs and x86, ARM, and Power CPUs. We demonstrate how Spatter can be used to generate analysis plots comparing different architectures and show that current GPUsystems achieve up to 65\% of STREAM bandwidth for sparse accesses and are more energy efficient in doing so for several different sparsity patterns. Our future plans for the spatter benchmark are to use these results to predict the impact of new memory access primitives on various architectures, develop backends for novel hardware like FPGAs and the Emu Chick, and automate testing so that users can perform their own sparse access studies .
This paper describes a new benchmark tool , Spatter, for assessing memory system architectures in the context of a specific category of indexed accesses known as gather and scatter. These types of operations are increasingly used to express sparse and irregular data access patterns, and they have widespread utility in many modern HPC applications including scientific simulations, data mining and analysis computations, and graph processing. However, many traditional benchmarking tools like STREAM, STRIDE, and GUPS focus on characterizing only uniform stride or fully random accesses despite evidence that modern applications use varied set of more complex access patterns. Spatter provides a tunable and configurable framework to benchmark a variety of indexed access patterns, including variations of gather/scatter that are seen in HPC mini-apps evaluated in this work. The design of Spatter includes tunable backends for OpenMP and CUDA, and experiments show how it can be used to evaluate 1) uniform access patterns for CPU and GPU, 2) prefetching regimes for gather/scatter, 3) compiler implementations of vectorization for gather/scatter, and 4) trace-driven "proxy patterns" that reflect the patterns found in multiple applications. The results from Spatter experiments show that GPUs typically outperform CPUs for these operations, and that Spatter can better predict the performance of some cache-dependent mini-apps than traditional STREAM bandwidth measurements .
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Recent characterizations of data movement performance have evaluated optimizations for dense and blocked accesses used by accelerators like GPUs and Xeon Phi, but sparse access patterns like scatter and gather are still not well understood across current and emerging architectures. We propose a tunable benchmark suite
This paper describes a new benchmark tool
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that allows users to characterize scatter, gather , and related sparse access patterns at a low level across multiple backends, including
for assessing memory system architectures in the context of a specific category of indexed accesses known as gather and scatter. These types of operations are increasingly used to express sparse and irregular data access patterns, and they have widespread utility in many modern HPC applications including scientific simulations, data mining and analysis computations, and graph processing. However, many traditional benchmarking tools like STREAM, STRIDE, and GUPS focus on characterizing only uniform stride or fully random accesses despite evidence that modern applications use varied set of more complex access patterns. Spatter provides a tunable and configurable framework to benchmark a variety of indexed access patterns, including variations of gather/scatter that are seen in HPC mini-apps evaluated in this work. The design of Spatter includes tunable backends for OpenMP and
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OpenCL, and OpenMP. Spatter also allows users to vary the block size and amount of data that is moved to create a more comprehensive picture of sparse access patterns
R
to model patternsthat are found in real applications. With Spatter we aim to characterize the performance of memory systems in a novel way by evaluating how the density of accesses compares against real-world effective memory bandwidths (measured by STREAM) and how it can be compared across widely varying architectures including GPUs and x86, ARM, and Power CPUs. We demonstrate how Spatter
experiments show how it
R
generate analysis plots comparing different architectures and show that current GPUsystems achieve up to 65\% of STREAM bandwidth for sparse accesses and are more energy efficient in doing so for several different sparsity patterns. Our future plans for the spatter benchmark are to use these results to predict the impact of new memory access primitives on various architectures, develop backends for novel hardware like FPGAs and the Emu Chick, and automate testing so that users can perform their own sparse access studies
evaluate 1) uniform access patterns for CPU and GPU, 2) prefetching regimes for gather/scatter, 3) compiler implementations of vectorization for gather/scatter, and 4) trace-driven "proxy patterns" that reflect the patterns found in multiple applications. The results from Spatter experiments show that GPUs typically outperform CPUs for these operations, and that Spatter can better predict the performance of some cache-dependent mini-apps than traditional STREAM bandwidth measurements