About 2D2D async_copy on RGB images and other stencil codes

[hominhquan]

Imagine we read an RGB image with three uchar per pixel (uchar[3]). All pixels of image are written (packed) into a cl_mem buffer. Then we want to use async_work_group_copy_2D2D() to optimize memory transfer between __global and __local.

The point is:

• If we use uchar3 vector type. The OpenCL 1.2 spec defined that "async_work_group_copy and async_work_group_strided_copy for 3-component vector types behave as async_work_group_copy and async_work_group_strided_copy respectively for 4-component vector types.", probably because 3-component vectors are aligned to 4-component ones. As a result, we will fall into a case where we have uchar4-like pointer arithmetic on a real-packed-uchar[3] buffer, that turns out to be very error-prone.

• This drawback can be avoided by fallbacking to the unit uchar interface and multiplying by three the associated num_elements_per_line and src/dst strides. But this adds more verbosity (and complexity) to the kernel code.

• More, on other stencil codes where the cell composition is none of the specified vector type in the spec (for example float9 for a D2Q9 (two-dimensional) [1] Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) solver or float19 for a D3Q19 (three-dimensional) [2]). We would have only the choice of the unit float interface of async_work_group_copy_2D2D, and the corresponding address-/stride-calculation will be a headache.

I'm wondering if we can improve the new async DMA spec for more ease of coding/optimizing for these scientific stencil applications ? like we don't bother calculating the begin address of each sub-image but always give in the original buffer pointer and position index (i, j) of the sub-block to be copied - the developer reasons in term of pixel, not byte or gentype. Then the async API, by taking an extra num_gentype_per_pixel for example, manages to jump to the correct address and copy the right amount of data underlying.

Below is a generic 2D2D copy and its necessary parameters in my mind:

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Muhammad-Abdul-Basit/publication/287166894_Lattice_Boltzmann_method_and_its_applications_to_fluid_flow_problems/links/5c3699c892851c22a368bf94/Lattice-Boltzmann-method-and-its-applications-to-fluid-flow-problems.pdf [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0898122111001064

[alycm]

Thank you for your feedback!

This is being discussed on internal issue 32.