Influence of memory access patterns to small-scale FFT performance

Modern GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) offer very high computing power at relative low cost. To take advantage of their computing resources and develop efficient implementations is essential to have certain knowledge about the architecture and memory hierarchy. In this paper, we use the FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) as a benchmark tool to analyze different aspects of GPU architectures, like the influence of the memory access pattern or the impact of the register pressure. The FFT is a good tool for performance analysis because it is used in many digital signal processing applications and has a good balance between computational cost and memory bandwidth requirements.