Automatic Horizontal Fusion for GPU Kernels

Abstract

We present automatic horizontal fusion, a novel optimization technique that complements the standard kernel fusion techniques for GPU programs. Unlike the standard fusion, whose goal is to eliminate intermediate data round trips, our horizontal fusion technique aims to increase the thread-level parallelism to hide instruction latencies. We also present HFuse, a new source to source CUDA compiler that implements automatic horizontal fusion. Our experimental results show that horizontal fusion can speed up the running time by 2.5%-60.8%. Our results reveal that the horizontal fusion is especially beneficial for fusing kernels with instructions that require different kinds of GPU resources (e.g., a memory-intensive kernel and a compute-intensive kernel).