high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

Many scientific simulations and models are based upon one or more coupled field equations. Fields are often modelled as a regular mesh or grid of individual field variables where each degrees of freedom or site variable is a scalar or vector quantity. Visualising such quantities interactively can be a great aid to debugging as well […]

The Cahn-Hilliard-Cook equation continues to be a useful model describing binary phase separation in systems such as alloys and other physical and chemical applications. We describe our investigation of this field equation and report on the various discretisation schemes we used to integrate the system in one-, two- and three-dimensions. We also discuss how the […]

We show how compiler technology can generate fast and efficient yet human-readable data-parallel simulation code for solving certain partial differential equation (PDE) based problems. We present a code parser and generator based on an ANTLR grammar and tree walking approach that transforms a mathematical formulation of an equation such as the Cahn-Hilliard family into simulation […]

Recent technological and economic developments have led to widespread availability of multi-core CPUs and specialist accelerator processors such as graphical processing units (GPUs). The accelerated computational performance possible from these devices can be very high for some applications paradigms. Software languages and systems such as NVIDIA’s CUDA and Khronos consortium’s open compute language (OpenCL) support […]

Many simulations in the physical sciences are expressed in terms of rectilinear arrays of variables. It is attractive to develop such simulations for use in 1-, 2-, 3- or arbitrary physical dimensions and also in a manner that supports exploitation of data-parallelism on fast modern processing devices. We report on data layouts and transformation algorithms […]

The Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) multi-core processor from the STI consortium of Sony, Toshiba and IBM is a powerful but complex processing device that has attracted much attention since its inclusion in Sony PlayStation (PS3) gaming consoles. We report on some performance experiments using the multicore Synergistic Processing Elements (SPE) concurrency capabilities of this […]

We present teraflop-scale calculations of biomolecular electrostatics enabled by the combination of algorithmic and hardware acceleration. The algorithmic acceleration is achieved with the fast multipole method (FMM) in conjunction with a boundary element method (BEM) formulation of the continuum electrostatic model, as well as the BIBEE approximation to BEM. The hardware acceleration is achieved through […]

We describe the design and FPGA implementation of a 3D torus network (TNW) to provide nearest-neighbor communications between commodity multi-core processors. The aim of this project is to build up tightly interconnected and scalable parallel systems for scientific computing. The design includes the VHDL code to implement on latest FPGA devices a network processor, which […]

The 16th HIPS workshop, to be held as a full-day meeting at the IPDPS 2011 conference in Anchorage, focuses on high-level programming of multiprocessors, compute clusters, and massively parallel machines. Like previous workshops in the series, which was established in 1996, this event serves as a forum for research in the areas of parallel applications, […]

Generating quality random numbers is a performance-critical application for many scientific simulations. Modern processing acceleration techniques such as: graphical co-processing units(GPUs), multi-core conventional CPUs; special purpose multicore CPUs; and parallel computing approaches such as multi-threading on shared memory or message passing on clusters, all offer ways to speed up random number generation (RNG). Providing fast […]

Models such as the Ising system in computational physics are still important tools for analysing phase transitions and universal behaviours for new irregular and distorted lattice networks. Data-parallelism can be exploited to speed up such simulations as well as their analysis using general purpose graphical processing units (GPU) and other accelerating devices. We report on […]

Finite-Differencing and other regular and direct approaches to solving partial differential equations (PDEs) are methods that fit well on data-parallel computer systems. These problems continue to arise in many application areas of computational science and engineering but still offer some programming challenges as they are not readily incorporated into a general standard software library that […]