Compiler-aided nd-range parallel-for implementations on CPU in hipSYCL

Abstract

With heterogeneous programming continuously on the rise, performance portability is still to be improved. SYCL provides the nd-range parallel-for paradigm for writing data-parallel kernels. This model allows barriers for group-local synchronization, similar to CUDA and OpenCL kernels. GPUs provide efficient means to model this, but on CPUs the necessary forward-progress guarantees require the use of many (lightweight) threads in library-only SYCL implementations, rendering the nd-range parallel-for unacceptably inefficient. By adopting two compiler-based approaches solving this, the present work improves the performance of the nd-range parallel-for in hipSYCL for CPUs by up to multiple orders of magnitude on various CPU architectures. The two alternatives are compared with regard to their functional correctness and performance. By upstreaming one of the variants, hipSYCL is the first SYCL implementation to provide a well performing nd-range parallel-for on CPU, without requiring an available OpenCL runtime.