Optimizing and Auto-Tuning Iterative Stencil Loops for GPUs with the In-Plane Method

Stencils represent an important class of computations that are used in many scientific disciplines. Increasingly, many of the stencil computations in scientific applications are being offloaded to GPUs to improve running times. Since a large part of the simulation time is spent inside the stencil kernels, optimizing the kernel is therefore important in the context of achieving greater computation efficiencies and reducing simulation time. In this work, we proposed a novel in-plane method for stencil computations on GPUs and compared its performance with the conventional method implemented in the Nvidia SDK. We also implemented an auto-tuning framework for our method to select the optimal parameters for different GPU architectures. A performance model was developed for our proposed method, and is used to speed up the auto-tuning process. Our results show that a speedup of nearly 2× can be achieved compared to Nvidia's implementation.