Cross-architecture performance prediction (XAPP) using CPU code to predict GPU performance

Newsha Ardalani, Clint Lestourgeon, Karthikeyan Sankaralingam, Xiaojin Zhu

Abstract: GPUs have become prevalent and more general purpose, but GPU programming remains challenging and time consuming for the majority of programmers. In addition, it is not always clear which codes will benefit from getting ported to GPU. Therefore, having a tool to estimate GPU performance for a piece of code before writing a GPU implementation is highly desirable. To this end, we propose Cross-Architecture Performance Prediction (XAPP), a machine-learning based technique that uses only single-threaded CPU implementation to predict GPU performance.