On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 16:48, Matthew Knepley <knepley@gmail.com> wrote:

Synopsis of what I said before to elicit comment:

1) I think the only thing we can learn from Brook, CUDA, OpenCL is that you identify threads by a grid ID.

2) Things like BLAS are so easy that you can move up to the streaming model, but this does not work for

- FD and FEM residual evaluation (Jed has an FD example with Aron, SNES ex52 is my FEM example)

- FD and FEM Jacobian evaluation

I think these are also probably too simple. Discontinuous Galerkin with overlapped flux computations and interior integration would be a somewhat better model problem. Nonlinear Gauss-Seidel in a multigrid context would be another.

I do not see DG a fundamentally different.

3) If you look at ex52 I do a "thread transposition" meaning threads start working on different areas of

memory which looks like a transpose on a 2D grid. I can do this using shared memory for the vector group.

The API is very simple. Give grid indices to the thread, and its done in CUDA and OpenCL essentially the
same way.

As is, this seems to assume a flat memory model and the memory access only appears in how the kernel uses threadIdx to determine what memory to operate on. If we could say something about this up-front, then the library could schedule tasks relative to memory and perhaps handle some updates for distributed memory.

My first rule would be, never assume library intelligence. So we make it possible to give a schedule for kernels, but initially there is

no scheduling code. It is user input, with a dumb default. The flat memory is the thread shared memory, and everything else is messages.

Can we have a way to specify the required memory access before launching the kernels?