Saved in:
| Main Authors: | , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2026
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.05982 |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| _version_ | 1866917388461539328 |
|---|---|
| author | Maeda, Yuki Taura, Kenjiro |
| author_facet | Maeda, Yuki Taura, Kenjiro |
| contents | Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) excel at regular data-parallel workloads where massive hardware parallelism can be readily exploited. In contrast, many important irregular applications are naturally expressed as task parallelism with a fork-join control structure. While CPU runtimes for fork-join task parallelism are mature, it remains challenging to efficiently support it on GPUs.
We propose GTaP, a GPU-resident runtime that supports fork-join task parallelism. GTaP is based on the persistent kernel model, and supports two worker granularities: thread blocks and individual threads. To realize fork-join on GPUs, GTaP represents joins as continuations and executes each task as a state machine that can be split into multiple execution segments. We also extend Clang's frontend with a pragma-based programming model that enables programmers to express fork-join without exposing low-level mechanisms. GTaP employs work stealing for load balancing, providing better scalability than a global-queue approach. For thread-level workers, we further introduce Execution-Path-Aware Queueing (EPAQ), which allows programmers to partition task queues using user-defined criteria, reducing warp divergence caused by mixing heterogeneous control flows within a warp.
Across representative irregular applications, GTaP outperforms OpenMP task-parallel execution on a 72-core CPU in many cases, especially for large problem sizes with compute-intensive tasks. We also show that GTaP's design choices outperform naive GPU alternatives. The benefit of EPAQ is workload-dependent: it can improve performance for some benchmarks while having little effect on others; on Fibonacci, EPAQ achieves up to a 1.8$\times$ speedup. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_05982 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | GTaP: A GPU-Resident Fork-Join Task-Parallel Runtime with a Pragma-Based Interface Maeda, Yuki Taura, Kenjiro Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) excel at regular data-parallel workloads where massive hardware parallelism can be readily exploited. In contrast, many important irregular applications are naturally expressed as task parallelism with a fork-join control structure. While CPU runtimes for fork-join task parallelism are mature, it remains challenging to efficiently support it on GPUs. We propose GTaP, a GPU-resident runtime that supports fork-join task parallelism. GTaP is based on the persistent kernel model, and supports two worker granularities: thread blocks and individual threads. To realize fork-join on GPUs, GTaP represents joins as continuations and executes each task as a state machine that can be split into multiple execution segments. We also extend Clang's frontend with a pragma-based programming model that enables programmers to express fork-join without exposing low-level mechanisms. GTaP employs work stealing for load balancing, providing better scalability than a global-queue approach. For thread-level workers, we further introduce Execution-Path-Aware Queueing (EPAQ), which allows programmers to partition task queues using user-defined criteria, reducing warp divergence caused by mixing heterogeneous control flows within a warp. Across representative irregular applications, GTaP outperforms OpenMP task-parallel execution on a 72-core CPU in many cases, especially for large problem sizes with compute-intensive tasks. We also show that GTaP's design choices outperform naive GPU alternatives. The benefit of EPAQ is workload-dependent: it can improve performance for some benchmarks while having little effect on others; on Fibonacci, EPAQ achieves up to a 1.8$\times$ speedup. |
| title | GTaP: A GPU-Resident Fork-Join Task-Parallel Runtime with a Pragma-Based Interface |
| topic | Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.05982 |