opencl - How do I know if the kernels are executing concurrently?

Question

I have a GPU with CC 3.0, so it should support 16 concurrent kernels. I am starting 10 kernels by looping through clEnqueueNDRangeKernel for 10 times. How do I get to know that the kernels are executing concurrently?

One way which I have thought is to get the time before and after the NDRangeKernel statement. I might have to use events so as to ensure the execution of the kernel has completed. But I still feel that the loop will start the kernels sequentially. Can someone help me out..

Answer 1

To determine if your kernel executions overlap, you have to profile them. This requires several steps:

1. Creating the command-queues

Profiling data is only collected if the command-queue is created with the property CL_QUEUE_PROFILING_ENABLE:

cl_command_queue queues[10];
for (int i = 0; i < 10; ++i) {
  queues[i] = clCreateCommandQueue(context, device, CL_QUEUE_PROFILING_ENABLE,
                                   &errcode);
}

2. Making sure all kernels start at the same time

You are right in your assumption that the CPU queues the kernels sequentially. However, you can create a single user event and add it to the wait list for all kernels. This causes the kernels not to start running before the user event is completed:

// Create the user event
cl_event user_event = clCreateUserEvent(context, &errcode);

// Reserve space for kernel events
cl_event kernel_events[10];

// Enqueue kernels
for (int i = 0; i < 10; ++i) {
  clEnqueueNDRangeKernel(queues[i], kernel, work_dim, global_work_offset,
                         global_work_size, 1, &user_event, &kernel_events[i]);
}

// Start all kernels by completing the user event
clSetUserEventStatus(user_event, CL_COMPLETE);

3. Obtain profiling times

Finally, we can collect the timing information for the kernel events:

// Block until all kernels have run to completion
clWaitForEvents(10, kernel_events);

for (int i = 0; i < 10; ++i) {
  cl_ulong start;
  clGetEventProfilingInfo(kernel_event[i], CL_PROFILING_COMMAND_START,
                          sizeof(start), &start, NULL);
  cl_ulong end;
  clGetEventProfilingInfo(kernel_event[i], CL_PROFILING_COMMAND_END,
                          sizeof(end), &end, NULL);
  printf("Event %d: start=%llu, end=%llu", i, start, end);
}

4. Analyzing the output

Now that you have the start and end times of all kernel runs, you can check for overlaps (either by hand or programmatically). The output units are nanoseconds. Note however that the device timer is only accurate to a certain resolution. You can query the resolution using:

size_t resolution;
clGetDeviceInfo(device, CL_DEVICE_PROFILING_TIMER_RESOLUTION,
                sizeof(resolution), &resolution, NULL);

FWIW, I tried this on a NVIDIA device with CC 2.0 (which should support concurrent kernels) and observed that the kernels were run sequentially.