Stencil
Abstract
In this chapter we dive into stencil sweep computation, which seems to be just convolution with special filter patterns. However, because the stencils come from discretization and numerical approximation of derivatives in solving differential equations, they have two characteristics that motivate and enable new optimizations. This chapter focuses on these new optimization opportunities and challenges. First, stencil sweeps are typically done on three-dimensional (3D) grids, whereas convolution is typically done on two-dimensional (2D) images or a small number of time slices of 2D images. This makes the tiling considerations different between the two and motivates thread coarsening for 3D stencils to enable larger input ...
Get Programming Massively Parallel Processors, 4th Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
