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NVIDIA Tensor Core Programmability, Performance & Precision | IEEE Conference Publication | IEEE Xplore

NVIDIA Tensor Core Programmability, Performance & Precision


Abstract:

The NVIDIA Volta GPU microarchitecture introduces a specialized unit, called Tensor Core that performs one matrix-multiply-and-accumulate on 4x4 matrices per clock cycle....Show More

Abstract:

The NVIDIA Volta GPU microarchitecture introduces a specialized unit, called Tensor Core that performs one matrix-multiply-and-accumulate on 4x4 matrices per clock cycle. The NVIDIA Tesla V100 accelerator, featuring the Volta microarchitecture, provides 640 Tensor Cores with a theoretical peak performance of 125 Tflops/s in mixed precision. In this paper, we investigate current approaches to program NVIDIA Tensor Cores, their performances and the precision loss due to computation in mixed precision. Currently, NVIDIA provides three different ways of programming matrix-multiply-and-accumulate on Tensor Cores: the CUDA Warp Matrix Multiply Accumulate (WMMA) API, CUTLASS, a templated library based on WMMA, and cuBLAS GEMM. After experimenting with different approaches, we found that NVIDIA Tensor Cores can deliver up to 83 Tflops/s in mixed precision on a Tesla V100 GPU, seven and three times the performance in single and half precision respectively. A WMMA implementation of batched GEMM reaches a performance of 4 Tflops/s. While precision loss due to matrix multiplication with half precision input might be critical in many HPC applications, it can be considerably reduced at the cost of increased computation. Our results indicate that HPC applications using matrix multiplications can strongly benefit from using of NVIDIA Tensor Cores.
Date of Conference: 21-25 May 2018
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 06 August 2018
ISBN Information:
Conference Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada

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