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Parallel Prefix Sum (Scan) with CUDA

My implementation of parallel exclusive scan in CUDA, following this NVIDIA paper.

Parallel prefix sum, also known as parallel Scan, is a useful building block for many parallel algorithms including sorting and building data structures. In this document we introduce Scan and describe step-by-step how it can be implemented efficiently in NVIDIA CUDA. We start with a basic naïve algorithm and proceed through more advanced techniques to obtain best performance. We then explain how to scan arrays of arbitrary size that cannot be processed with a single block of threads.

This implementation can handle very large arbitrary length vectors thanks to the recursively defined scan function.

Performance is increased with a memory-bank conflict avoidance optimization (BCAO).

See the timings for a performance comparison between:

1. Sequential scan run on the CPU
2. Parallel scan run on the GPU
3. Parallel scan with BCAO

For a vector of 10 million entries:

  CPU      : 20749 ms
  GPU      : 7.860768 ms
  GPU BCAO : 4.304064 ms

Intel Core i5-4670k @ 3.4GHz, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760