Detecting Bank Conflict of GPU Programs Using Symbolic Execution—Case Study

Abstract

GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) is used in various areas. Therefore, the demand for the verification of GPU programs is increasing. In this paper, we suggest the method to detect bank conflict by using symbolic execution. Bank conflict is one of the bugs happening in GPU and it leads the performance of programs lower. Bank conflict happens when some processing units in GPU access the same shared memory. Symbolic execution is the method to analysis programs with symbolic values. By using it, we can detect bank conflict on GPU programs which use many threads. We implement a prototype of the detector for bank conflict and evaluate it with some GPU programs. The result states that we can detect bank conflict on the programs with no loop regardless of the number of threads.

Performance and Security Analysis for GPU-Based Applications

“…The work in (Hamaya and Yamane, 2017) also checks the possibility of a bank conflict due to shared memory accesses performed by an arbitrary pair of threads. For this, a path condition for one thread is duplicated to represent the path condition of a second thread in the same warp.…”