A Multi-Teraflop Constituency Parser using GPUs

Constituency parsing with rich grammars re-mains a computational challenge. Graph-ics Processing Units (GPUs) have previously been used to accelerate CKY chart evalua-tion, but gains over CPU parsers were mod-est. In this paper, we describe a collection of new techniques that enable chart evaluation at close to the GPU’s practical maximum speed (a Teraflop), or around a half-trillion rule eval-uations per second. Net parser performance on a 4-GPU system is over 1 thousand length-30 sentences/second (1 trillion rules/sec), and 400 general sentences/second for the Berke-ley Parser Grammar. The techniques we intro-duce include grammar compilation, recursive symbol clustering and blocking, and cache-sharing. 1