  Convolution is a fundamental operation in many applications, such as computer
vision, natural language processing, image processing, etc. Recent successes of
convolutional neural networks in various deep learning applications put even
higher demand on fast convolution. The high computation throughput and memory
bandwidth of graphics processing units (GPUs) make GPUs a natural choice for
accelerating convolution operations. However, maximally exploiting the
available memory bandwidth of GPUs for convolution is a challenging task. This
paper introduces a general model to address the mismatch between the memory
bank width of GPUs and computation data width of threads. Based on this model,
we develop two convolution kernels, one for the general case and the other for
a special case with one input channel. By carefully optimizing memory access
patterns and computation patterns, we design a communication-optimized kernel
for the special case and a communication-reduced kernel for the general case.
Experimental data based on implementations on Kepler GPUs show that our kernels
achieve 5.16X and 35.5% average performance improvement over the latest cuDNN
library, for the special case and the general case, respectively.
