Best practices for string processing on the GPU?

Question

I was wondering just how realistic is it to process strings, rather than numerics, on the GPU? Specifically, what I'm interested in is using C++ AMP to perform comparisons between an array of strings and a target string.

I've started with basics such as passing a wchar_t* strings[] into a function, but it turns out that you cannot even create a view with a type smaller than an int!

So my question is - are there any best practices out there, or is this generally a bad idea? I'm also interested in things like warp divergence - for instance, how efficient would it be to compute string lengths on a large array?

Daniel Moth · Accepted Answer · 2012-08-20 20:08:56Z

6

You can work with chars in C++ AMP as per this blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/nativeconcurrency/archive/2012/01/17/c-amp-it-s-got-character-but-no-char.aspx

IMO warp divergence is no different in string processing as it would be in other algorithms, so I wouldn't pre-worry about that aspect of things. First get it right, then get it fast, then tune it to be faster.

In September we will post on our blog a string processing sample that shows performance benefits with C++ AMP over a CPU multi-core implementation - staty tuned for that. In short, yes it can be worth offloading string manipulation algorithms to accelerators such as the GPU.

answered Aug 20, 2012 at 20:08

Daniel Moth

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Ade Miller Over a year ago

You can find another string processing with C++ AMP here. ademiller.com/blogs/tech/2012/10/c-amp-extras-string-reversal

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