WCET Analysis of GPU L1 Data Caches

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have become widely used in high-performance computing. For real-time applications demanding high throughputs, GPUs can provide abundant computing power with high energy efficiency. However, modern GPUs are designed to boost average-case performance, not for time predictability. Therefore, for hard real-time applications, it is crucial to estimate their worst-case execution time (WCET) running on GPUs. As the first step toward this goal, this paper applies the abstract interpretation to GPU L1 data caches to estimate the worst-case L1 data cache miss rate of GPU applications. The experimental results show that the proposed analyzer can achieve safe and very tight estimation of GPU L1 data cache misses.