speedup when using float4, opencl - opencl

Question

I have the following opencl kernel function to get the column sum of a image.
__kernel void columnSum(__global float* src,__global float* dst,int srcCols,
int srcRows,int srcStep,int dstStep)
{
const int x = get_global_id(0);
srcStep >>= 2;
dstStep >>= 2;
if (x < srcCols)
{
int srcIdx = x ;
int dstIdx = x ;
float sum = 0;
for (int y = 0; y < srcRows; ++y)
{
sum += src[srcIdx];
dst[dstIdx] = sum;
srcIdx += srcStep;
dstIdx += dstStep;
}
}
}
I assign that each thread process a column here so that a lot of threads can get the column_sum of each column in parallel.
I also use float4 to rewrite the above kernel so that each thread can read 4 elements in a row at one time from the source image, which is shown below.
__kernel void columnSum(__global float* src,__global float* dst,int srcCols,
int srcRows,int srcStep,int dstStep)
{
const int x = get_global_id(0);
srcStep >>= 2;
dstStep >>= 2;
if (x < srcCols/4)
{
int srcIdx = x ;
int dstIdx = x ;
float4 sum = (float4)(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f);
for (int y = 0; y < srcRows; ++y)
{
float4 temp2;
temp2 = vload4(0, &src[4 * srcIdx]);
sum = sum + temp2;
vstore4(sum, 0, &dst[4 * dstIdx]);
srcIdx += (srcStep/4);
dstIdx += (dstStep/4);
}
}
}
In this case, theoretically, I think the time consumed by the second kernel to process a image should be 1/4 of the time consumed by the first kernel function. However, no matter how large the image is, the two kernels almost consume the same time. I don't know why. Can you guys give me some ideas? T

Answer 1

OpenCL vector data types like float4 were fitting better the older GPU architectures, especially AMD's GPUs. Modern GPUs don't have SIMD registers available for individual work-items, they are scalar in that respect. CL_DEVICE_PREFERRED_VECTOR_WIDTH_* equals 1 for OpenCL driver on NVIDIA Kepler GPU and Intel HD integrated graphics. So adding float4 vectors on modern GPU should require 4 operations. On the other hand, OpenCL driver on Intel Core CPU has CL_DEVICE_PREFERRED_VECTOR_WIDTH_FLOAT equal to 4, so these vectors could be added in a single step.

Answer 2

You are directly reading the values from "src" array (global memory). Which typically is 400 times slower than private memory. Your bottleneck is definitelly the memory access, not the "add" operation itself.
When you move from float to float4, the vector operation (add/multiply/...) is more efficient thanks to the ability of the GPU to operate with vectors. However, the read/write to global memory remains the same.
And since that is the main bottleneck, you will not see any speedup at all.
If you want to speed your algorithm, you should move to local memory. However you have to manually resolve the memory management, and the proper block size.

Answer 3

which architecture do you use?
Using float4 has higher instruction level parallelism (and then require 4 times less threads) so theoretically should be faster (see http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~volkov/volkov10-GTC.pdf)
However did i understand correctly in you kernel you are doing prefix-sum (you store the partial sum at every iteration of y)? If so, because of the stores the bottleneck is at the memory writes.

Answer 4

I think on the GPU float4 is not a SIMD operation in OpenCL. In other words if you add two float4 values the sum is done in four steps rather than all at once. Floatn is really designed for the CPU. On the GPU floatn serves only as a convenient syntax, at least on Nvidia cards. Each thread on the GPU acts as if it is scalar processor without SIMD. But the threads in a warp are not independent like they are on the CPU. The right way to think of the GPGPU models is Single Instruction Multiple Threads (SIMT).
http://www.yosefk.com/blog/simd-simt-smt-parallelism-in-nvidia-gpus.html
Have you tried running your code on the CPU? I think the code with float4 should run quicker (potentially four times quicker) than the scalar code on the CPU. Also if you have a CPU with AVX then you should try float8. If the float4 code is faster on the CPU than float8 should be even faster on a CPU with AVX.

Answer 5

try to define __ attribute __ to kernel and see changes in run timing
for example try to define:
__ kernel void __ attribute__((vec_type_hint(int)))
or
__ kernel void __ attribute__((vec_type_hint(int4)))
or some floatN as you want
read more:
https://www.khronos.org/registry/cl/sdk/1.0/docs/man/xhtml/functionQualifiers.html