Fine-Grained Synchronizations and Dataflow Programming on GPUs

The last decade has witnessed the blooming emergence of many-core platforms, especially the graphic processing units (GPUs). With the exponential growth of cores in GPUs, utilizing them efficiently becomes a challenge. The data-parallel programming model assumes a single instruction stream for multiple concurrent threads (SIMT); therefore little support is offered to enforce thread ordering and fine-grained synchronizations. This becomes an obstacle when migrating algorithms which exploit fine-grained parallelism, to GPUs, such as the dataflow algorithms.