Not everyone is able to write funky fused operators to make ML models run faster on GPUs using clever quantisation tricks. However lots of developers work with algorithms that feel like they should be able to leverage the thousands of cores in a GPU to run faster than using the dozens of cores on a server CPU. To see what is possible and what is involved, I revisited the first problem I ever considered trying to accelerate with a GPU. What is unusual about my chosen problem is that it is officially pointless, so you ought not to be able to find any library that will accelerate this algorithm, because it isn’t worth writing one! That makes it an interesting proxy for algorithms which aren’t catered for by high-performance libraries written by experts, but can be structured to run thousands of threads in parallel.
An Almost Pointless Exercise in GPU Optimization
· 21 min read
Chief Architect