streams

Investigating streams and events

This exercise demonstrates an asynchronous data transfer and computation. Three different asynchronous cases are created, and their timings are printed out. The timings are recorded with hipEvent calls.

Instructions

In the exercise, the following HIP functions are needed:

• hipStreamCreate()
• hipMemcpyAsync()
• hipEventRecord()
• hipEventSynchronize()
• hipEventElapsedTime()
• hipStreamDestroy()

Case 0

1. Create and destroy n_stream streams in the main function in the locations marked by #error
2. The function case_0() is already complete and can be used as a reference

Case 1

1. In the case_1() function, create a loop over n_stream and split the work done by the kernel call of Case 0 into multiple kernels calls (one kernel call per stream with an even workload per stream)
2. Record events using start_event and stop_event arrays for each stream before and after the kernel call

Case 2

1. Create a loop into the function case_2()
   1. In the loop: Split the data copy from host to device into n_stream asynchronous memcopies. one for each stream (make sure the memcopies are split evenly for each stream)
   2. In the loop: Launch the kernel for each stream similarly to Case 1
   3. In the loop: Split the data copy from device to host into n_stream asynchronous memcopies. one for each stream (make sure the memcopies are split asynchronously
2. Record total timing of the loop, use start_event[n_stream] and stop_event[n_stream] array positions
3. Additionally, record events for each stream using start_event and stop_event arrays before H-to-D memcopy and after D-to-H memcopy, respectively
4. Synchronize host with each stop_event[i]
5. Get timings between each corresponding start_event[i] and stop_event[i]

Case 3

1. Copy the case 2 here
2. Instead of doing the asynchronous memcopies and the kernel in the same loop as in Case 2, create a separate loop for each (3 loops in total)
3. Make sure you record events in appropriate locations to get correct timings

Additional considerations

• You can try setting USE_PINNED_HOST_MEM to 0 at line #6, to see how the timings change if we do not use pinned host memory.