GPU Boost for the Tesla K40

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Over at the Acceleware Blog, Saad Rahim writes that GPU Boost is a new user controllable feature to change the processor clock speed on the Tesla K40 GPU.

NVIDIA is currently supporting 4 selectable Stream Processor clock speeds and two selectable Memory Clock Speeds on the K40. The base clock for the Stream Processors is 745MHz and the three selectable options are 666 MHz, 810 MHz and 875MHz (finally, a manufacturer not afraid of superstition!). The base Memory Clock frequencies are 3004MHz (default) and 324MHz (idle). Only the effects of tuning the Stream Processor clock are discussed as there is no application performance increase that results from adjusting the Memory Clock. This blog shows the impact of GPU Boost on a seismic imaging application (Reverse Time Migration) and an electromagnetic solver (Finite-difference time-domain).

So, is GPU Boost worth the trouble? According to Rahim, GPU Boost is a relatively simple way to increase performance by up to 17.5%. While this may be a lot easier than optimizing a CUDA kernel, the increased power consumption must be considered, especially on large clusters.

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