  KBLAS is a new open source high performance library that provides optimized
kernels for a subset of Level 2 BLAS functionalities on CUDA-enabled GPUs.
Since performance of dense matrix-vector multiplication is hindered by the
overhead of memory accesses, a double-buffering optimization technique is
employed to overlap data motion with computation. After identifying a proper
set of tuning parameters, KBLAS is able to efficiently run on various GPU
architectures across different generations, avoiding the time-consuming step of
code rewriting, while still being compliant with the standard BLAS API. Another
advanced optimization technique allows to ensure coalesced memory access when
dealing with submatrices, especially in the context of high level dense linear
algebra algorithms. All four precisions KBLAS kernels have been leveraged to
multi-GPUs environment, which requires the introduction of new APIs to ease
users' experiences on these challenging systems. The KBLAS performance
outperforms existing state-of-the-art implementations on all matrix sizes,
achieves asymptotically up to 50% and 60% speedup on single GPU and multi-GPUs
systems, respectively, and validates our performance model. A subset of KBLAS
high performance kernels has been integrated into NVIDIA's standard BLAS
implementation (cuBLAS) for larger dissemination, starting version 6.0.

Mathematical Software