• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.1151-1156
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• 2017

It is common to achieve lower performance in traversing tree data structures in GPU than one expects. In this paper, we analyze the reason of lower-than-expected performance in GPU tree traversal and present that the warp divergences is caused by the branch instructions ("if${\ldots}$ else") which appear commonly in tree traversal CUDA codes. Also, we compare the parallel shifted sort algorithm which can reduce the number of warp divergences with a kd-tree CUDA implementation to show that the shifted sort algorithm can work faster than the kd-tree CUDA implementation thanks to less warp divergences. As the analysis result, the shifted sort algorithm worked about 16-fold faster than the kd-tree CUDA implementation for $2^{23}$ query points and $2^{23}$ data points in $R^3$ space. The performance gaps tend to increase in proportion to the number of query points and data points.