Power Optimization for GPU Programs Based on Software Prefetching

GPUs render higher computing unit density than contemporary CPUs and thus exhibit much higher power consumption despite its higher power efficiency. The power consumption has become an important issue that impacts CPU's applications, thereby necessitating the low power optimization technology for GPUs. Software prefetching is an efficient way to alleviate the memory wall problem which overlaps the computing and memory access latencies. However, software prefetching will cause some power overhead because it increases the number and density of the instructions. Thus, we should consider the balance between the performance income and the power overhead when applying the optimization. To address this problem, in this paper we first analyze the multi-thread execution model of GPU and validate the potential space of software prefetching optimization. Then we give the software prefetching method for GPU programs to improve the performance. Aiming at two different objects: energy optimization under performance constraint and performance optimization under power constraint, we discuss the optimization methods based on software prefetching and dynamic voltage scaling technologies. The experimental results show that our method can efficiently optimize the energy consumption (performance) under the performance (power) constraint.