Reducing Number of Registers Used in CUDA Kernel

Question

I have a kernel which uses 17 registers, reducing it to 16 would bring me 100% occupancy. My question is: are there methods that can be used to reduce the number or registers used, excluding completely rewriting my algorithms in a different manner. I have always kind of assumed the compiler is a lot smarter than I am, so for example I often use extra variables for clarity's sake alone. Am I wrong in this thinking?

Please note: I do know about the --max_registers (or whatever the syntax is) flag, but the use of local memory would be more detrimental than a 25% lower occupancy (I should test this)

Answer 1

hi

It's really hard to say, nvcc compiler is not very smart in my opinion.
You can try obvious things, for example using short instead of int, passing and using variables by reference (e.g.&variable), unrolling loops, using templates (as in C++). If you have divisions, transcendental functions, been applied in sequence, try to make them as a loop. Try to get rid of conditionals, possibly replacing them with redundant computations.

If you post some code, maybe you will get specific answers.

Answer 2

Occupancy can be a little misleading and 100% occupancy should not be your primary target. If you can get fully coalesced accesses to global memory then on a high end GPU 50% occupancy will be sufficient to hide the latency to global memory (for floats, even lower for doubles). Check out the Advanced CUDA C presentation from GTC last year for more information on this topic.

In your case, you should measure performance both with and without maxrregcount set to 16. The latency to local memory should be hidden as a result of having sufficient threads, assuming you don't random access into local arrays (which would result in non-coalesced accesses).

To answer you specific question about reducing registers, post the code for more detailed answers! Understanding how compilers work in general may help, but remember that nvcc is an optimising compiler with a large parameter space, so minimising register count has to be balanced with overall performance.

Answer 3

The instruction count increase when lowering the register usage have a simple explanation. The compiler could be using registers to store the results of some operations that are used more than once through your code in order to avoid recalculating those values, when forced to use less registers, the compiler decides to recalculate those values that would be stored in registers otherwise.

Answer 4

It is not generally a good approach to minimize register pressure. The compiler does a good job optimizing the overall projected kernel performance, and it takes into account lots of factors, incliding register.

How does it work when reducing registers caused slower speed

Most probably the compiler had to spill insufficient register data into "local" memory, which is essentially the same as global memory, and thus very slow

For optimization purposes I would recommend to use keywords like const, volatile and so on where necessary, to help the compiler on the optimization phase.

Anyway, it is not these tiny issues like registers which often make CUDA kernels run slow. I'd recommend to optimize work with global memory, the access pattern, caching in texture memory if possible, transactions over the PCIe.