high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

As distributed memory systems grow larger, communication demands have increased. Unfortunately, while the costs of arithmetic operations continue to decrease rapidly, communication costs have not. As a result, there has been a growing interest in communication-avoiding algorithms for some of the classic problems in numerical computing, including communication-avoiding Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs). A previously-developed low-communication FFT, however, has remained largely out of the picture, partially due to its reliance on the Fast Multipole Method (FMM), an algorithm that typically aids in accelerating dense computations. We have begun an algorithmic investigation and re-implementation design for the FMM-accelerated FFT, which exploits the ability to tune precision of the result (due to the mathematical nature of the FMM) to reduce power-burning communication and computation, the potential benefit of which is to reduce the energy required for the fundamental transform of digital signal processing. We reintroduce this algorithm as well as discuss new innovations for separating the distinct portions of the FMM into a CPUdedicated process, relying on inter-processor communication for approximate interactions, and a GPU-dedicated process for dense interactions with no communication.