QuCo: Efficient and Flexible Hardware-Driven Automatic Configuration of Tile Transfers in GPUs

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Authors: Nicolás Meseguer, Daoxuan Xu, Yifan Sun, Michael Pellauer, José Luis Abellán, Manuel E. Acacio
Cited by: 0
References: 35

Abstract

The growing complexity and parallelism demands of modern GPU workloads have driven architectural innovations toward asynchronous tile transfers (ATTs) to overlap computation and data movement. While ATT units such as the NVIDIA's Tensor Memory Accelerator (TMA) introduce high-throughput memory transfers, programmers must deal with wavefront specialization, select tile sizes, queue slots, and synchronization primitives, all of which are hardware-specific and workloaddependent. Existing GPU libraries fall short-offering limited ATT support and configurability-so developers still resort to manual exploration of this vast parameter space, which is laborious, error-prone, and fundamentally limits performance portability across GPUs. In this work, we present QuCo (Queue Configurator), a single lightweight hardware unit embedded in the GPU that fully automates the ATT configuration process. Inspired by Blackwell GPU design, QuCo includes a compact RISC-V processor, small memory structures for instructions and data, and a GPU Specification Table (GST) storing key architectural parameters. Using the GST and workload characteristics, along with built-in heuristics, QuCo computes optimal queue configurations at kernel launch. This relieves the programmer of the tedious, time-consuming task of tuning and offline profiling, while simultaneously increasing post-compilation performance portability.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques Embedded Systems Design Techniques Computer Graphics and Visualization Techniques

Publication details

Journal / source
IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)
Pages
1–14
Publication date
31 January 2026
Language
EN