Patent attributes
A “cooperative thread array,” or “CTA,” is a group of multiple threads that concurrently execute the same program on an input data set to produce an output data set. Each thread in a CTA has a unique thread identifier assigned at thread launch time that controls various aspects of the thread's processing behavior such as the portion of the input data set to be processed by each thread, the portion of an output data set to be produced by each thread, and/or sharing of intermediate results among threads. Different threads of the CTA are advantageously synchronized at appropriate points during CTA execution using a barrier synchronization technique in which barrier instructions in the CTA program are detected and used to suspend execution of some threads until a specified number of other threads also reaches the barrier point.
