This is my CUDA implementation of Numenta's Spatial Pooling algorithm.

My goal starting this project was to create an efficient CUDA backend for the entire Numenta's Platform for Intelligent Computing (NuPIC). I am open to starting an OSS project. If you are interested, do not hesitate to contact me!

Each SP column is mapped to a single thread. Unlike the original sequential version, inhibition is performed only per CUDA block of 1024 threads (some newer devices allow 2048 threads per block). This can be further improved in a future version, e.g. by mapping multiple columns to a single thread. This also means that the size of the spatial pooler is limited by the maximum number of threads your device can spin per kernel and the amount of global memory.

Initial permanences, potential connections and boost factors are initialized on the device - the only data transferred is the input vector. Transfer from pinned memory is faster, but incomparably slower to allocate. The potential connections are stored indeces with regards to the starting point to the block of input which belongs to corresponding CUDA block, and hence the overlap can be calculated simply as a block-wise CSR matrix-vector multiplication (with boost factors considered), input values being stored in shared memory. According to this paper, this should be reasonably efficient choice.

Although most methods make extensive use of parallel, block-wise reduction to speed up their execution, some further opitmization can be made: adaptSynapses() exhibits some thread divergence (but I don't know how this can be evaded), and inhibitColumns() can potentially use more efficient sorting method (this probably does not present major bottleneck. however).

This code performs significantly faster than the sequential C++ implementation, and can handle input of almost unlimited size. For example, with input of 131072 neurons and 32768 SP columns, the kernel performs one iteration in 28.536 ms on (rather obsolete) GeForce GTX 670, while handles input and number of columns of half the size (since it doesn't allow larger inputs) in 268.98 ms - 9.43x speedup on larger input.

• nVidia GPU with CUDA compatibility version >= 2.0 (most Tesla products and newer)
• CUDA Toolkit installed
• A C++ compiler (such as GCC)

You can check for CUDA compatibility of your device here. The newest version of CUDA toolkit is available for download here.

To build the main program, simply type

nvcc HelloSP.cu -o HelloSP -std=c++11

Building the unit tests is done analogously

nvcc UnitSP.cu -o UnitSP -std=c++11

Unit tests are run simply by running UnitSP.cu

The initial work was funded by the Grant agency of CTU Prague under project SGS16/231/OHK3/3T/13.