Techniques for divergent thread group execution scheduling

US11934867B2 · kind B2 · utility

Assignee

• NVIDIA Corporation · US

Inventors

• Sana Damani · Atlanta, US
• Mark W. Stephenson · Austin, US
• Ram Rangan · Austin, US
• Daniel R. Johnson · Maple Grove, US
• Rishkul Kulkarni · Austin, US

Key dates

• Filing date: Feb 24, 2021
• Grant date: Mar 19, 2024
• Expiry date: Mar 9, 2042

Classification

• Technology area (CPC G): Physics
• CPC primary: G06F9/522
• WIPO field: Computer technology
• WIPO sector: Electrical engineering

Abstract

Warp sharding techniques to switch execution between divergent shards on instructions that trigger a long stall, thereby interleaving execution between diverged threads within a warp instead of across warps. The technique may be applied to mitigate pipeline stalls in applications with low warp occupancy and high divergence. Warp data cache locality may also be improved by concentrating memory accesses within a warp rather than spreading them across warps.