Calculate matrix determinants with cublas device API

Question

I am trying to evaluate a scalar function f(x), where x is a k-dimensional vector (i.e. f:R^k->R). During the evaluation, I have to perform many matrix operations: inversion, multiplication and finding matrix determinants and traces for matrices of moderate sizes (most of them are less than 30x30). Now I want to evaluate the function at many different xs at the same time by using different threads on the GPU. That is why I need the device api.

I have written the following codes to test calculating matrix determinants by the cublas device API, cublasSgetrfBatched, where I first find the LU decomposition of the matrix and calculate the product of all the diagonal elements in the U matrix. I have done this on both the GPU thread and CPU using the result returned by cublas. But the result from the GPU does not make any sense while the result on the CPU is correct. I have used cuda-memcheck, but found no errors. Could someone help shed some light on this issue? Many thanks.

    cat test2.cu

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <math.h>
#include <cuda_runtime.h>
#include <cublas_v2.h>


__host__ __device__ unsigned int IDX(unsigned int i,unsigned  int j,unsigned int ld){return j*ld+i;}

#define PERR(call) \
  if (call) {\
   fprintf(stderr, "%s:%d Error [%s] on "#call"\n", __FILE__, __LINE__,\
      cudaGetErrorString(cudaGetLastError()));\
   exit(1);\
  }
#define ERRCHECK \
  if (cudaPeekAtLastError()) { \
    fprintf(stderr, "%s:%d Error [%s]\n", __FILE__, __LINE__,\
       cudaGetErrorString(cudaGetLastError()));\
    exit(1);\
  }

__device__ float
det_kernel(float *a_copy,unsigned int *n,cublasHandle_t *hdl){
  int *info = (int *)malloc(sizeof(int));info[0]=0;
  int batch=1;int *p = (int *)malloc(*n*sizeof(int));  
  float **a = (float **)malloc(sizeof(float *));
  *a = a_copy;  
  cublasStatus_t status=cublasSgetrfBatched(*hdl, *n, a, *n, p, info, batch);  
  unsigned int i1;
  float res=1;
  for(i1=0;i1<(*n);++i1)res*=a_copy[IDX(i1,i1,*n)];
  return res;
}

__global__ void runtest(float *a_i,unsigned int n){
  cublasHandle_t hdl;cublasCreate_v2(&hdl);
  printf("det on GPU:%f\n",det_kernel(a_i,&n,&hdl));  
  cublasDestroy_v2(hdl);
}

int
main(int argc, char **argv)
{
  float a[] = {
    1,   2,   3,
    0,   4,   5,
    1,   0,   0};
  cudaSetDevice(1);//GTX780Ti on my machine,0 for GTX1080
  unsigned int n=3,nn=n*n;
  printf("a is \n");
  for (int i = 0; i < n; ++i){    
    for (int j = 0; j < n; j++) printf("%f, ",a[IDX(i,j,n)]);    
    printf("\n");}
  float *a_d;
  PERR(cudaMalloc((void **)&a_d, nn*sizeof(float)));
  PERR(cudaMemcpy(a_d, a, nn*sizeof(float), cudaMemcpyHostToDevice));
  runtest<<<1, 1>>>(a_d,n);
  cudaDeviceSynchronize();
  ERRCHECK;

  PERR(cudaMemcpy(a, a_d, nn*sizeof(float), cudaMemcpyDeviceToHost));
  float res=1;
  for (int i = 0; i < n; ++i)res*=a[IDX(i,i,n)];
  printf("det on CPU:%f\n",res);
}

  nvcc -arch=sm_35 -rdc=true -o test test2.cu -lcublas_device -lcudadevrt
./test
a is 
1.000000, 0.000000, 1.000000, 
2.000000, 4.000000, 0.000000, 
3.000000, 5.000000, 0.000000, 
det on GPU:0.000000
det on CPU:-2.000000

Robert Crovella Robert Crovella · Accepted Answer · 2016-11-29T15:03:32

cublas device calls are asynchronous.

That means that they return control to the calling thread before the cublas call is finished.

If you want the calling thread to be able to process the results directly (as you are doing here to compute res), you must force a synchronization to wait for the results, before beginning computation.

You don't see this in the host side computation, because there is implicit synchronization of any device activity (including cublas device dynamic parallelism), before the parent kernel terminates.

So if you add add a synchronization after the device cublas call, like this:

cublasStatus_t status=cublasSgetrfBatched(*hdl, *n, a, *n, p, info, batch); 
cudaDeviceSynchronize(); // add this line

I think you'll see a match between the device computation and the host computation, as you expect.

Calculate matrix determinants with cublas device API

1 Answers