Improve CUDA softmax performance #4973
Merged
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Simple fix with a very large perf benefit for smaller sizes. Below are some plots (
dim_size
= size of the softmaxed dimension,outer_size
= batch size, z-axis = ratio of old time to new time). In general, as long asdim_size < 1024
you get at least a 2x speedup with this code, 4x if you fit in 256, and even 12x for sizes around 100 and smaller.I tried playing with some other potential improvements like replacing the blockReduce function with a shuffle-based one, but it gave mixed results (-20% time in some cases, +20% time in other cases).
Thanks to @nikitakit for reporting #4893 (which is fixed in this PR).