vkpolybench: A crossplatform Vulkan Compute port of the PolyBench/GPU benchmark suite

Abstract

PolyBench is a well-known set of benchmarks characterized by embarrassingly parallel kernels able to run on Graphic Processing Units (GPUs). While Polybench GPU kernels leverage well-established GP-GPU APIs such as CUDA and OpenCL, in this paper we present vkpolybench, a crossplatform PolyBench/GPU port built on top of Vulkan. Vulkan is the recently released Khronos standard for heterogeneous CPU–GPU computing that is gaining significant traction lately. Compared to CUDA and OpenCL, the Vulkan API improves GPU utilization while reducing CPU overheads.

Keywords

• GP-GPU computing
• Heterogeneous architectures
• High performance computing