Selective thread spawning within a multi-threaded processing system

A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium including instructions that, when executed by a processing unit, cause the processing unit to selectively spawn thread blocks in a multiprocessing system, by performing:

• receiving a request to execute a thread program, wherein the request includes a reference to the thread program to be executed and a reference to a predicate table that includes a plurality of entries corresponding to a plurality of thread indices, the plurality of entries indicating which thread blocks of a thread grid should execute the thread program, and each thread block including one or more threads, each thread to execute the thread program on a parallel processing engine;
• initializing one or more loop variables, wherein each loop variable is associated with a different dimension of the predicate table, and a value of each loop variable indicates an index into the predicate table in the associated dimension;
• computing a thread index based on the one or more loop variables;
• and
• reading the predicate table at the entry corresponding to the computed thread index to determine whether a thread block associated with the computed thread index should be spawned.

A system for to selectively spawning thread blocks, comprising:

• a memory;
• and
• a parallel processing unit coupled to the memory and having a multiprocessing architecture and including:
• a work distribution unit configured to:
• receive a request to execute a thread program, wherein the request includes a reference to the thread program to be executed and a reference to a predicate table that includes a plurality of entries corresponding to a plurality of thread indices, the plurality of entries indicating which thread blocks of a thread grid should execute the thread program, and each thread block including one or more threads, each thread executing the thread program on a parallel processing engine,
• initialize one or more loop variables, wherein each loop variable is associated with a different dimension of the predicate table, and a value of each loop variable indicates an index into the predicate table in the associated dimension,
• compute a thread index based on the one or more loop variables, and
• read the predicate table at the entry corresponding to the computed thread index to determine whether a thread block associated with the computed thread index should be spawned,
• a scheduler coupled to the work distribution unit, and
• a plurality of processing engines coupled to the scheduler.