# How can I improve this matrix product calculation in OpenCL?

I am trying to compute a matrix-matrix product of N stacked complex double N x N matrices. For simplicity, I assume N = 512. I have written code in C++ parallelized with OMP and using OpenBLAS for the matrix-matrix product. This is the code:

#include <iostream>
#include <complex>
#include <chrono>
#include <openblas/cblas.h>

typedef std::complex<double> cx;

int main() {
const int NUM_REPS = 10; // Number of speed test repetitions

const int N = 512;
const int N3 = N * N * N;
const int N2 = N * N; // Distance between matrices

cx *A = new cx[N3];
cx *B = new cx[N3];
cx *C = new cx[N3];

cx alpha = 1.0;
cx beta = 0.0;

for (int i = 0; i < NUM_REPS; i++) {

#pragma omp parallel for
for (int j = 0; j < N3; j++) {
A[j] = cx(1, 1);
B[j] = cx(0, 1);
}

#pragma omp parallel for
for (int k = 0; k < N; k++) {
cblas_zgemm(CblasRowMajor, CblasConjTrans, CblasNoTrans, N, N, N,
&alpha,
&(A[k * N2]), N,
&(B[k * N2]), N,
&beta,
&(C[k * N2]), N);
}

std::cout << "Delta [ms] = "
<< std::chrono::duration_cast<std::chrono::milliseconds>(end - start).count()
<< std::endl;

cx checksum = 0.0;
for (int j = 0; j < N3; j++)
checksum += C[j];
std::cout << checksum << std::endl;
}

return 0;

}


Note that in the example, the first matrix should be transposed before the multiplication and the memory layout is row major.

The "checksum" for the output I receive is (6.87195e+10,6.87195e+10). On my laptop, each iteration in i takes about 2.381s.

Since this feels a little bit long, I was wondering whether this can be improved by using the GPU for the computation. The main problem here is that a 512³ matrix stack does not fit into the GPU memory all at once since it takes 2 GB of memory per stack. My GPU (Nvidia GeForce MX450) has exactly 2 GB of memory, so that will not work. The only solution would be to copy the stack in chunks into the GPU memory, perform the multiplication of this sub-stack and copy the results back into host memory which means that it becomes an "out of core" operation, see also for example this answer, which describes splitting a large matrix into blocks and multiplying blockwise on the GPU.

For this, I am using the CLBlast library, more specifically the GemmStridedBatched method. Here is the full code:

#include <iostream>
#include <complex>
#include <chrono>
#include <clblast.h>

#include "cl.hpp"

typedef std::complex<double> cx;

int main()
{
const int NUM_REPS = 10; // Number of speed test repetitions

const int N = 512;
const int N3 = N * N * N;
const int N2 = N * N; // Distance between matrices
const int block_len = 128; // Length of each block, must divide N

const auto platform_id = 0;
const auto device_id = 0; // This selects the Nvidia GPU

cx *A = new cx[N3];
cx *B = new cx[N3];
cx *C = new cx[N3];

cx alpha = 1.0;
cx beta = 0.0;

// Get OpenCL platform and device
std::vector<cl::Platform> platforms = std::vector<cl::Platform>();
cl::Platform::get(&platforms);
if (platforms.size() == 0 || platform_id >= platforms.size()) {
std::cout << "No platform." << std::endl;
return -1;
}
cl::Platform platform = platforms[platform_id];
std::vector<cl::Device> devices = std::vector<cl::Device>();
platform.getDevices(CL_DEVICE_TYPE_ALL, &devices);
if (devices.size() == 0 || device_id >= devices.size()) {
std::cout << "No device." << std::endl;
return -1;
}
cl::Device device = devices[device_id];

auto device_as_vector = std::vector<cl::Device>{device};
auto context = cl::Context(device_as_vector);
auto queue = cl::CommandQueue(context, device);
cl_event event;

auto device_a2 = cl::Buffer(context, CL_MEM_READ_ONLY, N2 * block_len * sizeof(cx));
auto device_b = cl::Buffer(context, CL_MEM_READ_ONLY, N2 * block_len * sizeof(cx));
auto device_c = cl::Buffer(context, CL_MEM_WRITE_ONLY, N2 * block_len * sizeof(cx));

// Repeat the speed test NUM_REPS times
for (int i = 0; i < NUM_REPS; i++) {
for (int j = 0; j < N3; j++) {
A[j] = cx(1, 1);
B[j] = cx(0, 1);
}

// Matrix-matrix product over blocks of length block_len
// in GPU memory
for (int k = 0; k < N; k += block_len) {
queue.enqueueWriteBuffer(device_a2, CL_TRUE, 0, N2 * block_len * sizeof(cx), &(A[k * N2]));
queue.enqueueWriteBuffer(device_b, CL_TRUE, 0, N2 * block_len * sizeof(cx), &(B[k * N2]));

auto queue_plain = queue();
auto status = clblast::GemmStridedBatched(
clblast::Layout::kRowMajor,
clblast::Transpose::kConjugate, clblast::Transpose::kNo,
N, N, N,
alpha,
device_a2(), 0, N, N2,
device_b(), 0, N, N2,
beta,
device_c(), 0, N, N2,
block_len,
&queue_plain, &event);

// Record the execution time
if (status == clblast::StatusCode::kSuccess) {
clWaitForEvents(1, &event);
clReleaseEvent(event);
}
else {
std::cout << "(1) FAILURE: " << (int)status << std::endl;
return -1;
}

queue.enqueueReadBuffer(device_c, CL_TRUE, 0, N2 * block_len * sizeof(cx), &(C[k * N2]));
}

std::cout << "Delta [ms] = "
<< std::chrono::duration_cast<std::chrono::milliseconds>(end - start).count()
<< std::endl;

cx checksum = 0.0;
for (int j = 0; j < N3; j++)
checksum += C[j];
std::cout << checksum << std::endl;
}

return 0;

}


Here, block_len defines the number of matrices from the stack which lives in the GPU memory at the same time. This number must divide N so as not to "miss" any matrices. (In a more general implementation this can of course be adapted to allow arbitrary stack sizes.)

The cl.hpp header can be found here. I have used the OpenGL code from this example from the CLBlast library as a basis for this code.

My problem is, that this version actually takes 10.838s per iteration in i. That is unexpected and I honestly don't know if I can then make the code actually faster than 2s per iteration using OpenBLAS. However, since I am new to OpenCL there may be some way to actually improve the speed of my code. This would be my first question. More generally, is there maybe another way to improve the speed of this stacked matrix-matrix product? I might have missed something important.