Fast Fourier Transform with CuPy

CuPy covers the full Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) functionalities provided in NumPy (cupy.fft) and a subset in SciPy (cupyx.scipy.fft). In addition to those high-level APIs that can be used as is, CuPy provides additional features to

  1. access advanced routines that cuFFT offers for NVIDIA GPUs,

  2. control better the performance and behavior of the FFT routines.

Some of these features are experimental (subject to change, deprecation, or removal, see API Compatibility Policy) or may be absent in hipFFT/rocFFT targeting AMD GPUs.

SciPy FFT backend

Since SciPy v1.4 a backend mechanism is provided so that users can register different FFT backends and use SciPy’s API to perform the actual transform with the target backend, such as CuPy’s cupyx.scipy.fft module. For a one-time only usage, a context manager scipy.fft.set_backend() can be used:

import cupy as cp
import cupyx.scipy.fft as cufft
import scipy.fft

a = cp.random.random(100).astype(cp.complex64)
with scipy.fft.set_backend(cufft):
    b = scipy.fft.fft(a)  # equivalent to cufft.fft(a)

However, such usage can be tedious. Alternatively, users can register a backend through scipy.fft.register_backend() or scipy.fft.set_global_backend() to avoid using context managers:

import cupy as cp
import cupyx.scipy.fft as cufft
import scipy.fft
scipy.fft.set_global_backend(cufft)

a = cp.random.random(100).astype(cp.complex64)
b = scipy.fft.fft(a)  # equivalent to cufft.fft(a)

Note

Please refer to SciPy FFT documentation for further information.

Note

To use the backend together with an explicit plan argument requires SciPy version 1.5.0 or higher. See below for how to create FFT plans.

User-managed FFT plans

For performance reasons, users may wish to create, reuse, and manage the FFT plans themselves. CuPy provides a high-level experimental API get_fft_plan() for this need. Users specify the transform to be performed as they would with most of the high-level FFT APIs, and a plan will be generated based on the input.

import cupy as cp
from cupyx.scipy.fft import get_fft_plan

a = cp.random.random((4, 64, 64)).astype(cp.complex64)
plan = get_fft_plan(a, axes=(1, 2), value_type='C2C')  # for batched, C2C, 2D transform

The returned plan can be used either explicitly as an argument with the cupyx.scipy.fft APIs:

import cupyx.scipy.fft

# the rest of the arguments must match those used when generating the plan
out = cupyx.scipy.fft.fft2(a, axes=(1, 2), plan=plan)

or as a context manager for the cupy.fft APIs:

with plan:
    # the arguments must match those used when generating the plan
    out = cp.fft.fft2(a, axes=(1, 2))

FFT plan cache

However, there are occasions when users may not want to manage the FFT plans by themselves. Moreover, plans could also be reused internally in CuPy’s routines, to which user-managed plans would not be applicable. Therefore, starting CuPy v8 we provide a built-in plan cache, enabled by default. The plan cache is done on a per device, per thread basis, and can be retrieved by the get_plan_cache() API.

>>> import cupy as cp
>>>
>>> cache = cp.fft.config.get_plan_cache()
>>> cache.show_info()
------------------- cuFFT plan cache (device 0) -------------------
cache enabled? True
current / max size   : 0 / 16 (counts)
current / max memsize: 0 / (unlimited) (bytes)
hits / misses: 0 / 0 (counts)

cached plans (most recently used first):

>>> # perform a transform, which would generate a plan and cache it
>>> a = cp.random.random((4, 64, 64))
>>> out = cp.fft.fftn(a, axes=(1, 2))
>>> cache.show_info()  # hit = 0
------------------- cuFFT plan cache (device 0) -------------------
cache enabled? True
current / max size   : 1 / 16 (counts)
current / max memsize: 262144 / (unlimited) (bytes)
hits / misses: 0 / 1 (counts)

cached plans (most recently used first):
key: ((64, 64), (64, 64), 1, 4096, (64, 64), 1, 4096, 105, 4, 'C', 2, None), plan type: PlanNd, memory usage: 262144

>>> # perform the same transform again, the plan is looked up from cache and reused
>>> out = cp.fft.fftn(a, axes=(1, 2))
>>> cache.show_info()  # hit = 1
------------------- cuFFT plan cache (device 0) -------------------
cache enabled? True
current / max size   : 1 / 16 (counts)
current / max memsize: 262144 / (unlimited) (bytes)
hits / misses: 1 / 1 (counts)

cached plans (most recently used first):
key: ((64, 64), (64, 64), 1, 4096, (64, 64), 1, 4096, 105, 4, 'C', 2, None), plan type: PlanNd, memory usage: 262144

>>> # clear the cache
>>> cache.clear()
>>> cp.fft.config.show_plan_cache_info()  # = cache.show_info(), for all devices
=============== cuFFT plan cache info (all devices) ===============
------------------- cuFFT plan cache (device 0) -------------------
cache enabled? True
current / max size   : 0 / 16 (counts)
current / max memsize: 0 / (unlimited) (bytes)
hits / misses: 0 / 0 (counts)

cached plans (most recently used first):

The returned PlanCache object has other methods for finer control, such as setting the cache size (either by counts or by memory usage). If the size is set to 0, the cache is disabled. Please refer to its documentation for more detail.

Note

As shown above each FFT plan has an associated working area allocated. If an out-of-memory error happens, one may want to inspect, clear, or limit the plan cache.

Note

The plans returned by get_fft_plan() are not cached.

FFT callbacks

cuFFT provides FFT callbacks for merging pre- and/or post- processing kernels with the FFT routines so as to reduce the access to global memory. This capability is supported experimentally by CuPy. Users need to supply custom load and/or store kernels as strings, and set up a context manager via set_cufft_callbacks(). Note that the load (store) kernel pointer has to be named as d_loadCallbackPtr (d_storeCallbackPtr).

import cupy as cp

# a load callback that overwrites the input array to 1
code = r'''
__device__ cufftComplex CB_ConvertInputC(
    void *dataIn,
    size_t offset,
    void *callerInfo,
    void *sharedPtr)
{
    cufftComplex x;
    x.x = 1.;
    x.y = 0.;
    return x;
}
__device__ cufftCallbackLoadC d_loadCallbackPtr = CB_ConvertInputC;
'''

a = cp.random.random((64, 128, 128)).astype(cp.complex64)

# this fftn call uses callback
with cp.fft.config.set_cufft_callbacks(cb_load=code):
    b = cp.fft.fftn(a, axes=(1,2))

# this does not use
c = cp.fft.fftn(cp.ones(shape=a.shape, dtype=cp.complex64), axes=(1,2))

# result agrees
assert cp.allclose(b, c)

# "static" plans are also cached, but are distinct from their no-callback counterparts
cp.fft.config.get_plan_cache().show_info()

Note

Internally, this feature requires recompiling a Python module for each distinct pair of load and store kernels. Therefore, the first invocation will be very slow, and this cost is amortized if the callbacks can be reused in the subsequent calculations. The compiled modules are cached on disk, with a default position $HOME/.cupy/callback_cache that can be changed by the environment variable CUPY_CACHE_DIR.

Multi-GPU FFT

CuPy currently provides two kinds of experimental support for multi-GPU FFT.

Warning

Using multiple GPUs to perform FFT is not guaranteed to be more performant. The rule of thumb is if the transform fits in 1 GPU, you should avoid using multiple.

The first kind of support is with the high-level fft() and ifft() APIs, which requires the input array to reside on one of the participating GPUs. The multi-GPU calculation is done under the hood, and by the end of the calculation the result again resides on the device where it started. Currently only 1D complex-to-complex (C2C) transform is supported; complex-to-real (C2R) or real-to-complex (R2C) transforms (such as rfft() and friends) are not. The transform can be either batched (batch size > 1) or not (batch size = 1).

import cupy as cp

cp.fft.config.use_multi_gpus = True
cp.fft.config.set_cufft_gpus([0, 1])  # use GPU 0 & 1

shape = (64, 64)  # batch size = 64
dtype = cp.complex64
a = cp.random.random(shape).astype(dtype)  # reside on GPU 0

b = cp.fft.fft(a)  # computed on GPU 0 & 1, reside on GPU 0

If you need to perform 2D/3D transforms (ex: fftn()) instead of 1D (ex: fft()), it would likely still work, but in this particular use case it loops over the transformed axes under the hood (which is exactly what is done in NumPy too), which could lead to suboptimal performance.

The second kind of usage is to use the low-level, private CuPy APIs. You need to construct a Plan1d object and use it as if you are programming in C/C++ with cuFFT. Using this approach, your input array can reside on the host as a numpy.ndarray so that its size can be much larger than what a single GPU can accommodate, which is one of the main reasons to run multi-GPU FFT.

import numpy as np
import cupy as cp

# no need to touch cp.fft.config, as we are using low-level API

shape = (64, 64)
dtype = np.complex64
a = np.random.random(shape).astype(dtype)  # reside on CPU

if len(shape) == 1:
    batch = 1
    nx = shape[0]
elif len(shape) == 2:
    batch = shape[0]
    nx = shape[1]

# compute via cuFFT
cufft_type = cp.cuda.cufft.CUFFT_C2C  # single-precision c2c
plan = cp.cuda.cufft.Plan1d(nx, cufft_type, batch, devices=[0,1])
out_cp = np.empty_like(a)  # output on CPU
plan.fft(a, out_cp, cufft.CUFFT_FORWARD)

out_np = numpy.fft.fft(a)  # use NumPy's fft
# np.fft.fft alway returns np.complex128
if dtype is numpy.complex64:
    out_np = out_np.astype(dtype)

# check result
assert np.allclose(out_cp, out_np, rtol=1e-4, atol=1e-7)

For this use case, please consult the cuFFT documentation on multi-GPU transform for further detail.

Note

The multi-GPU plans are cached if auto-generated via the high-level APIs, but not if manually generated via the low-level APIs.

Half-precision FFT

cuFFT provides cufftXtMakePlanMany and cufftXtExec routines to support a wide range of FFT needs, including 64-bit indexing and half-precision FFT. CuPy provides an experimental support for this capability via the new (though private) XtPlanNd API. For half-precision FFT, on supported hardware it can be twice as fast than its single-precision counterpart. NumPy does not yet provide the necessary infrastructure for half-precision complex numbers (i.e., numpy.complex32), though, so the steps for this feature is currently a bit more involved than common cases.

import cupy as cp
import numpy as np


shape = (1024, 256, 256)  # input array shape
idtype = odtype = edtype = 'E'  # = numpy.complex32 in the future

# store the input/output arrays as fp16 arrays twice as long, as complex32 is not yet available
a = cp.random.random((shape[0], shape[1], 2*shape[2])).astype(cp.float16)
out = cp.empty_like(a)

# FFT with cuFFT
plan = cp.cuda.cufft.XtPlanNd(shape[1:],
                              shape[1:], 1, shape[1]*shape[2], idtype,
                              shape[1:], 1, shape[1]*shape[2], odtype,
                              shape[0], edtype,
                              order='C', last_axis=-1, last_size=None)

plan.fft(a, out, cp.cuda.cufft.CUFFT_FORWARD)

# FFT with NumPy
a_np = cp.asnumpy(a).astype(np.float32)  # upcast
a_np = a_np.view(np.complex64)
out_np = np.fft.fftn(a_np, axes=(-2,-1))
out_np = np.ascontiguousarray(out_np).astype(np.complex64)  # downcast
out_np = out_np.view(np.float32)
out_np = out_np.astype(np.float16)

# don't worry about accruacy for now, as we probably lost a lot during casting
print('ok' if cp.mean(cp.abs(out - cp.asarray(out_np))) < 0.1 else 'not ok')

The 64-bit indexing support for all high-level FFT APIs is planned for a future CuPy release.