Intel® FPGA SDK for OpenCL™ Pro Edition: Best Practices Guide

ID 683521
Date 10/04/2021
Public

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6.1.3. Transferring Loop-Carried Dependency to Local Memory

For a loop-carried dependency that you cannot remove, improve the II by moving the array with the loop-carried dependency from global memory to local memory.

Consider the following kernel example:

1 #define N 128
2
3 __kernel void unoptimized( __global int* restrict A )
4 {
5     for (unsigned i = 0; i < N; i++)
6           A[N-i] = A[i];
7 }	 

Global memory accesses have long latencies. In this example, the loop-carried dependency on the array A[i] causes the long latency. This latency is reflected by an II of 227 in the optimization report. To reduce the II value by transferring the loop-carried dependency from global memory to local memory, perform the following tasks:

  1. Copy the array with the loop-carried dependency to local memory. In this example, array A[i] becomes array B[i] in local memory.
  2. Execute the loop with the loop-carried dependence on array B[i].
  3. Copy the array back to global memory.
When you transfer array A[i] to local memory and it becomes array B[i], the loop-carried dependency is now on B[i]. Because local memory has a much lower latency than global memory, the II value improves.

Below is the restructured kernel optimized:

 1 #define N 128
 2
 3 __kernel void optimized( __global int* restrict A )
 4 {
 5     int B[N];
 6
 7     for (unsigned i = 0; i < N; i++)
 8         B[i] = A[i];
 9
10     for (unsigned i = 0; i < N; i++)
11         B[N-i] = B[i];
12
13     for (unsigned i = 0; i < N; i++)
14         A[i] = B[i];
15 }

An optimization report similar to the one below indicates the successful reduction of II from 227 to 2: