high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

This paper reports our efforts on swCaffe, a highly efficient parallel framework for accelerating deep neural networks (DNNs) training on Sunway TaihuLight, the current fastest supercomputer in the world that adopts a unique many-core heterogeneous architecture, with 40,960 SW26010 processors connected through a customized communication network. First, we point out some insightful principles to fully […]

Off-chip memory traffic is a major source of power and energy consumption on mobile platforms. A large amount of this off-chip traffic is used to manipulate graphics framebuffer surfaces. To cut down the cost of accessing off-chip memory, framebuffer surfaces are compressed to reduce the bandwidth consumed on surface manipulation when rendering or displaying. In […]

The ANTAREX project relies on a Domain Specific Language (DSL) based on Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) concepts to allow applications to enforce extra functional properties such as energy-efficiency and performance and to optimize Quality of Service (QoS) in an adaptive way. The DSL approach allows the definition of energy-efficiency, performance, and adaptivity strategies as well […]

FPGAs balance the reprogammability of CPUs and the performance of ASICs. They seem the perfect solution to increase the throughput of neural networks. However they must also prove to be highly competitive in a market dominated by GPUs. To achieve this, we focus on the strength of FPGAs that cannot be taken advantage of on […]

In 2019, the rapid rate at which GPU manufacturers refresh their designs, coupled with their reluctance to disclose microarchitectural details, is still a hurdle for those software designers who want to extract the highest possible performance. Last year, these very reasons motivated us to dissect the Volta GPU architecture using microbenchmarks. The introduction in August […]

Heterogeneity has turned into one of the most profound and challenging characteristics of today’s HPC environments. Modern HPC platforms have become highly heterogeneous owing to the tight integration of multicore CPUs and accelerators (such as Graphics Processing Units, Intel Xeon Phis, or Field-Programmable Gate Arrays) empowering them to maximize the dominant objectives of performance and […]

Massive parallelism, and energy efficiency of GPUs, along with advances in their programmability with OpenCL and CUDA programming models have made them attractive for general-purpose computations across many application domains. Techniques for testing GPU kernels have emerged recently to aid the construction of correct GPU software. However, there exists no means of measuring quality and […]

Hardware accelerators are a fundamental part of modern high performance computing (HPC) systems due to their performance capabilities. The two most commonly used accelerators are GPUs and FPGAs. Despite the easier programmability and better memory performance of GPUs, generally FPGAs perform equally well for computationally challenging applications while dramatically reducing the energy consumption. Furthermore, with […]

The Nvidia GPU architecture has introduced new computing elements such as the tensor cores, which are special processing units dedicated to perform fast matrix-multiply-accumulate (MMA) operations and accelerate Deep Learning applications. In this work we present the idea of using tensor cores for a different purpose such as the parallel arithmetic reduction problem, and propose […]

TensorFlow is a popular emerging open-source programming framework supporting the execution of distributed applications on heterogeneous hardware. While TensorFlow has been initially designed for developing Machine Learning (ML) applications, in fact TensorFlow aims at supporting the development of a much broader range of application kinds that are outside the ML domain and can possibly include […]

As throughput-oriented accelerators, GPUs provide tremendous processing power by executing a massive number of threads in parallel. However, exploiting high degrees of thread-level parallelism (TLP) does not always translate to the peak performance that GPUs can offer, leaving the GPUs resources often under-utilized. Compared to compute resources, memory resources can tolerate considerably lower levels of […]

FPGA devices have been proving to be good candidates to accelerate applications from different research topics. For instance, machine learning applications such as K-Means clustering usually relies on large amount of data to be processed, and, despite the performance offered by other architectures, FPGAs can offer better energy efficiency. With that in mind, Intel ® […]