Thanks to their scalable parallel processing capability, GPUs are promising computing resources for graph processing, in which identical operations are applied to a large number of edges and vertices. However, the sparsity and skewness of real-world graphs cause imbalanced workloads across GPU threads within the same warp, thus impeding efficient processing on the GPU. To mitigate this workload imbalance problem, existing works propose workload balancing hardware and software schemes. However, these solutions often suffer from additional memory overhead or increased computations and communication overheads during inter-warp and intra-warp synchronization. This work proposes a new hardware-software collaborative graph processing framework, SparseWeaver, that converts sparse operations in graph processing into dense operations using graph topology and makes the workloads balanced across GPU threads. Based on the analysis of common patterns in software schemes, we propose Weaver, a new lightweight GPU functional unit microarchitecture that fully leverages the benefits of the GPU architecture and exploits memory access locality. We prototype SparseWeaver on the open-source RISC-V Vortex GPU and demonstrate 2.36 times faster execution time compared to state-of-the-art schemes while incurring a low area overhead of 0.045% from increased dedicated logic registers.

Graphics rendering remains one of the most compute intensive and memory bound applications of GPUs and has been driving their push for performance and energy efficiency since its inception. Early GPU architectures focused only on accelerating graphics rendering and implemented dedicated fixed- function rasterizer hardware to speed-up their rendering pipeline. As GPUs have become more programmable and ubiquitous in other application domains such as scientific computing, machine learning, graph analytics, and crypto-currency, generalizing GPU microarchitectures for area and power efficiency becomes necessary, especially for mobile and IoT devices. In this work, we present Skybox, a full-stack open-source GPU architecture with integrated software, compiler, hardware, and simulation environment, that enables end-to-end GPU research. Using Skybox, we explore the design space of software versus hardware graphics rendering and propose and hybrid micro-architecture that accelerates the state-of-the art Vulkan graphics API. Skybox also introduces novel compiler and system optimizations to support its unique RISC-V ISA baseline. We evaluated Skybox on high- end Altera and also Xilinx FPGAs. We were able to generate and execute a 32 cores (512 threads) Skybox graphics processor on Altera Stratix 10 FPGA, delivering a peak fill rate of 3.7 GPixels at 230 MHz. Skybox is the first open-source full-stack GPU software and hardware implementation that supports the Vulkan API

Graphics rendering remains one of the most compute-intensive and memory-bound applications of GPUs and has been driving their push for performance and energy efficiency since its inception. Early GPU architectures focused only on accelerating graphics rendering and implemented dedicated a fixed-function rendering units. Today’s GPUs have become more programmable to address the complexity and diversity of modern graphics workloads while still accelerating several components of the graphics pipeline in fixed-function hardware.Generalizing the GPU microarchitecture and implement some of its graphics hardware blocks in software can save area that can be used to expand the generic pipeline, especially in mobile systems-on-chips environments where power and area is scarce.In this work, we propose a RISC-V-based hybrid GPU architecture that accelerates the graphics pipeline without paying the cost of a full hardware graphics pipeline. We evaluated the design on an Altera Arria 10 FPGA running at 200 MHz.