Computing platforms equipped with accelerators like GPUs have proven to provide great computational power. However, exploiting such platforms for existing scientific applications is not a trivial task. Current GPU programming frameworks such as CUDA C\/C++ require low-level programming from the developer in order to achieve high performance code. As a result porting of applications to GPUs is typically limited to time-dominant algorithms and routines, leaving the remainder not accelerated which can open a serious Amdahl’s law issue. The lattice QCD application Chroma allows to explore a different porting strategy. The layered structure of the software architecture logically separates the data-parallel from the application layer. The QCD Data-Parallel software layer provides data types and expressions with stencil-like operations suitable for lattice field theory and Chroma implements algorithms in terms of this high-level interface. Thus by porting the low-level layer one can effectively move the whole application in one swing to a different platform. The QDP-JIT\/PTX library, the reimplementation of the low-level layer, provides a framework for lattice QCD calculations for the CUDA architecture. The complete software interface is supported and thus applications can be run unaltered on GPU-based parallel computers. This reimplementation was possible due to the availability of a JIT compiler (part of the NVIDIA Linux kernel driver) which translates an assembly-like language (PTX) to GPU code. The expression template technique is used to build PTX code generators and a software cache manages the GPU memory. This reimplementation allows us to deploy an efficient implementation of the full gauge-generation program with dynamical fermions on large-scale GPU-based machines such as Titan and Blue Waters which accelerates the algorithm by more than an order of magnitude.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Computing platforms equipped with accelerators like GPUs have proven to provide great computational power. However, exploiting such platforms for existing scientific applications is not a trivial task. Current GPU programming frameworks such as CUDA C\/C++ require low-level programming from the developer in order to achieve high performance code. As a result porting of applications to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":351,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[36,89,3,12],"tags":[1787,215,98,14,110,597,20,1783,193,335,1390],"class_list":["post-12715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-algorithms","category-nvidia-cuda","category-paper","category-physics","tag-algorithms","tag-code-generation","tag-computational-physics","tag-cuda","tag-high-energy-physics-lattice","tag-mathematical-software","tag-nvidia","tag-physics","tag-ptx","tag-qcd","tag-tesla-k20"],"views":2340,"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/351"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12715\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}