SIMD re-convergence at thread frontiers

Hardware and compiler techniques for mapping data-parallel programs with divergent control flow to SIMD architectures have recently enabled the emergence of new GPGPU programming models such as CUDA, OpenCL, and DirectX Compute. The impact of branch divergence can be quite different depending upon whether the program's control flow is structured or unstructured. In this paper, we show that unstructured control flow occurs frequently in applications and can lead to significant code expansion when executed using existing approaches for handling branch divergence.