Today marks one year since the Intel GPA project was discontinued.
At the time, I felt a real sense of emptiness. GPA was an external-facing tool, and working on something used by people outside my immediate team gave me a strong feeling of purpose. It was not only a technical project to me; it also became part of my professional identity and even helped support my extraordinary ability visa case.
Over the past year, working in architecture modeling has changed how I think about GPU performance analysis. I started to look less at application behavior as a black box, and more at the command streams submitted to the GPU, the hardware blocks they touch, and the metrics that describe how those blocks behave. That perspective made me rethink what future GPU tuning workflows could look like.
Continue reading “Thoughts on Architecture-Awareness Performance Diagnosis”