high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

Given that CPU clock speeds are stagnating, programmers are resorting to parallelism to improve the performance of their applications. Although such parallelism has usually been attained using either multicore architectures, multiple CPUs and/or clusters of machines, the GPU has since been used as an alternative. GPUs are an interesting resource because they can provide much […]

A decade ago, graphics processing units have been used specifically for high-speed graphics. Of late, they are becoming more popular as general purpose parallel processors. With the release of CUDA, ATI Stream and OpenCL, programmers can now split their program execution between CPU and GPU, whenever appropriate, resulting in huge performance gain. The cost of […]

Graphics Processor Units (GPUs) are known for offering high performance and power efficiency for processing algorithms that suit well to theirmassively parallel architecture. Unfortunately, as parallel programming for thiskind of architecture requires a complex distribution of tasks and data, developersfind it difficult to implement their applications effectively. Although approachesbased on source-to-source and model-to-source transformations have […]

In order to build the radio telescopes needed for the experiments planned for the years to come, it will be necessary to design computers capable of performing thousands more floating point operations per second than the actual most powerful computers of today, and do it in a very power efficient way. In this work we […]

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have enabled significant improvements in computational performance compared to traditional CPUs in several application domains. Until recently, GPUs have been programmed using C/C++ based methods such as CUDA (NVIDIA) and OpenCL (NVIDIA and AMD). Using these approaches, Fortran Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) codes would have to be completely re-written to take […]

Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) studies the dynamics of an electrically conducting fluid under the influence of a magnetic field. Many astrophysical phenomena are related to MHD, and computer simulations are used to model these dynamics. In this thesis, we conduct MHD simulations of non-radiative black hole accretion as well as fast magnetic reconnection. By performing large scale […]

The Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) is widely used to simulate different types of flow, such as water, oil and gas in porous reservoirs. In the oil industry it is commonly used to estimate petrophysical properties of porous rocks, such as the permeability. To achieve the required accuracy it is necessary to use big simulation models […]

An important class of compute accelerators are graphics processing units (GPUs). Popular programming models for non-graphics computation on GPUs, such as CUDA and OpenCL, provide an abstraction of many parallel scalar threads. Contemporary GPU hardware groups 32 to 64 scalar threads as a single warp or wavefront and executes this group of scalar threads in […]

Using a popular Monte Carlo workload which implements European option pricing, we tested a variety of architectures including NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, ClearSpeed accelerator and multi-core processors and different programming approaches. We conclude that this particular workload seems most suitable for running on GPU type of architecture compared to other alternatives such as CPU or […]

Graphic Processing Units (GPU) have become increasingly adopted for the enhancement of computing throughput. However, the development of a high-quality GPU application is challenging, due to the large optimization space and complex unpredictable effects of optimizations on GPU program performance. Many recent efforts have been employing empirical search-based auto-tuners to tackle the problem, but few […]

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are performed in order to detect the genetic variations associated with physical traits (e.g. diseases), and Plink is a popular software system for analyzing the data of GWAS. Due to the large datasets involved, the task of data processing can be very time-consuming. Although GPUs (graphics processing units) are not generally […]

A desired trend within high energy physics is to increase particle accelerator luminosities, leading to production of more collision data and higher probabilities of finding interesting physics results. A central data analysis technique used to determine whether results are interesting or not is the maximum likelihood method, and the corresponding evaluation of the negative log-likelihood, […]