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CUTLASS 2.0

CUTLASS 2.0 - November 2019

CUTLASS is a collection of CUDA C++ template abstractions for implementing high-performance matrix-multiplication (GEMM) at all levels and scales within CUDA. It incorporates strategies for hierarchical decomposition and data movement similar to those used to implement cuBLAS. CUTLASS decomposes these "moving parts" into reusable, modular software components abstracted by C++ template classes. These thread-wide, warp-wide, block-wide, and device-wide primitives can be specialized and tuned via custom tiling sizes, data types, and other algorithmic policy. The resulting flexibility simplifies their use as building blocks within custom kernels and applications.

To support a wide variety of applications, CUTLASS provides extensive support for mixed-precision computations, providing specialized data-movement and multiply-accumulate abstractions for 8-bit integer, half-precision floating point (FP16), single-precision floating point (FP32), and double-precision floating point (FP64) types. Furthermore, CUTLASS demonstrates warp-synchronous matrix multiply operations for targeting the programmable, high-throughput Tensor Cores implemented by NVIDIA's Volta and Turing architectures.

What's New in CUTLASS 2.0

CUTLASS 2.0 is a substantial refactoring from the previous version, intended to offer:

• Better performance over 1.x, particularly for kernels targeting Turing Tensor Cores
• Robust and durable templates that reliably span the design space
• Encapsulated functionality that may be reusable in other contexts

Example CUTLASS GEMM

The following illustrates an example function that defines a CUTLASS GEMM kernel with single-precision inputs and outputs. This is an exercpt from the CUTLASS SDK basic_gemm example.

//
// CUTLASS includes needed for single-precision GEMM kernel
//

// Defines cutlass::gemm::device::Gemm, the generic Gemm computation template class.

#include <cutlass/gemm/device/gemm.h>

/// Define a CUTLASS GEMM template and launch a GEMM kernel.
cudaError_t cutlass_sgemm_nn(
  int M,
  int N,
  int K,
  float alpha,
  float const *A,
  int lda,
  float const *B,
  int ldb,
  float beta,
  float *C,
  int ldc) {

  // Define type definition for single-precision CUTLASS GEMM with column-major
  // input matrices and 128x128x8 threadblock tile size (chosen by default).
  //
  // To keep the interface manageable, several helpers are defined for plausible compositions
  // including the following example for single-precision GEMM. Typical values are used as
  // default template arguments. See `cutlass/gemm/device/default_gemm_configuration.h` for more details.
  //
  // To view the full gemm device API interface, see `cutlass/gemm/device/gemm.h`

  using ColumnMajor = cutlass::layout::ColumnMajor;

  using CutlassGemm = cutlass::gemm::device::Gemm<float,        // Data-type of A matrix
                                                  ColumnMajor,  // Layout of A matrix
                                                  float,        // Data-type of B matrix
                                                  ColumnMajor,  // Layout of B matrix
                                                  float,        // Data-type of C matrix
                                                  ColumnMajor>; // Layout of C matrix

  // Define a CUTLASS GEMM type

  CutlassGemm gemm_operator;

  // Construct the CUTLASS GEMM arguments object.
  //
  // One of CUTLASS's design patterns is to define gemm argument objects that are constructible
  // in host code and passed to kernels by value. These may include pointers, strides, scalars,
  // and other arguments needed by Gemm and its components.
  //
  // The benefits of this pattern are (1.) a structured, composable strategy for passing host-constructible
  // arguments to kernels and (2.) minimized initialization overhead on kernel entry.
  //

  CutlassGemm::Arguments args({M , N, K},  // Gemm Problem dimensions
                              {A, lda},    // Tensor-ref for source matrix A
                              {B, ldb},    // Tensor-ref for source matrix B
                              {C, ldc},    // Tensor-ref for source matrix C
                              {C, ldc},    // Tensor-ref for destination matrix D (may be different memory than source C matrix)
                              {alpha, beta}); // Scalars used in the Epilogue

  //
  // Launch the CUTLASS GEMM kernel.
  //

  cutlass::Status status = gemm_operator(args);

  //
  // Return a cudaError_t if the CUTLASS GEMM operator returned an error code.
  //

  if (status != cutlass::Status::kSuccess) {
    return cudaErrorUnknown;
  }

  // Return success, if no errors were encountered.

  return cudaSuccess;
}

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