Block reduction in CUDA

Question

I am trying to do reduction in CUDA and I am really a newbie. I am currently studying a sample code from NVIDIA.

I guess I am really not sure how to set up the block

Answer 1

Robert Crovella has already answered this question, which is mainly about understanding rather than performance.

However, for all those bumping into this question, I just want to highlight that CUB makes block reduction features available. Below, I'm providing a simple worked example on how using CUB's BlockReduce.

#include 
#include 

#include "Utilities.cuh"

#include 

#define BLOCKSIZE   32

const int N = 1024;

/**************************/
/* BLOCK REDUCTION KERNEL */
/**************************/
__global__ void sum(const float * __restrict__ indata, float * __restrict__ outdata) {

    unsigned int tid = blockIdx.x * blockDim.x + threadIdx.x;

    // --- Specialize BlockReduce for type float. 
    typedef cub::BlockReduce BlockReduceT; 

    // --- Allocate temporary storage in shared memory 
    __shared__ typename BlockReduceT::TempStorage temp_storage; 

    float result;
    if(tid < N) result = BlockReduceT(temp_storage).Sum(indata[tid]);

    // --- Update block reduction value
    if(threadIdx.x == 0) outdata[blockIdx.x] = result;

    return;  
}

/********/
/* MAIN */
/********/
int main() {

    // --- Allocate host side space for 
    float *h_data       = (float *)malloc(N * sizeof(float));
    float *h_result     = (float *)malloc((N / BLOCKSIZE) * sizeof(float));

    float *d_data;      gpuErrchk(cudaMalloc(&d_data, N * sizeof(float)));
    float *d_result;    gpuErrchk(cudaMalloc(&d_result, (N / BLOCKSIZE) * sizeof(float)));

    for (int i = 0; i < N; i++) h_data[i] = (float)i;

    gpuErrchk(cudaMemcpy(d_data, h_data, N * sizeof(float), cudaMemcpyHostToDevice));

    sum<<>>(d_data, d_result);
    gpuErrchk(cudaPeekAtLastError());
    gpuErrchk(cudaDeviceSynchronize());

    gpuErrchk(cudaMemcpy(h_result, d_result, (N / BLOCKSIZE) * sizeof(float), cudaMemcpyDeviceToHost));

    std::cout << "output: ";
    for(int i = 0; i < (N / BLOCKSIZE); i++) std::cout << h_result[i] << " ";
    std::cout << std::endl;

    gpuErrchk(cudaFree(d_data));
    gpuErrchk(cudaFree(d_result));

    return 0;
}

In this example, an array of length N is created and the result is the sum of 32 consecutive elements. So

result[0] = data[0] + ... + data[31];
result[1] = data[32] + ... + data[63];
....