Vis3D+ A tightly integrated GPU-accelerated computation and rendering framework for interactive 3D image visualization

We propose a generalized method for adapting and optimizing algorithms for efficient execution on modern graphics processing units (GPU). The method consists of several steps. First, build a control flow graph (CFG) of the algorithm. Next, transform the CFG into a tree of loops and merge non-parallelizable loops into parallelizable ones. Finally, map the resulting loops tree to the tree of GPU computational units, unrolling the algorithm’s loops as necessary for the match. The mapping should be performed bottom-up, from the lowest GPU architecture levels to the highest ones, to minimize off-chip memory access and maximize register file usage. The method provides programmer with a convenient and robust mental framework and strategy for GPU code optimization. We demonstrate the method by adapting to a GPU the DPLL backtracking search algorithm for solving the Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT). The resulting GPU version of DPLL outperforms the CPU version in raw tree search performance sixfold for regular Boolean satisfiability problems and twofold for irregular ones.

Graphic processing units (GPUs) emerged recently as an exciting new hardware environment for a truly parallel implementation and execution of Nature and Bio-inspired Algorithms with excellent price-to-power ratio. In contrast to common multicore CPUs that contain up to tens of independent cores, the GPUs represent a massively parallel single-instruction multiple-data devices that can nowadays reach peak performance of hundreds and thousands of giga floating-point operations per second. Nature and Bio-inspired Algorithms implement parallel optimization strategies in which a single candidate solution, a group of candidate solutions (population), or multiple populations seek for optimal solution or set of solutions of given problem. Genetic algorithms (GA) constitute a family of traditional and very well-known nature-inspired populational meta-heuristic algorithms that have proved its usefulness on a plethora of tasks through the years. Differential evolution (DE) is another efficient populational meta-heuristic algorithm for real-parameter optimization. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) can be seen as nature-inspired multiagent method in which the interaction of simple independent agents yields intelligent collective behavior. Simulated annealing (SA) is global optimization algorithm which combines statistical mechanics and combinatorial optimization with inspiration in metallurgy. This survey provides a brief overview of the latest state-of-the-art research on the design, implementation, and applications of parallel GA, DE, PSO, and SA-based methods on the GPUs.

The modern graphics processing unit (GPU) found in many standard personal computers is a highly parallel math processor capable of nearly 1 TFLOPS peak throughput at a cost similar to a high-end CPU and an excellent FLOPS/watt ratio. High-level linear algebra operations are computationally intense, often requiring O(N3) operations and would seem a natural fit for the processing power of the GPU. Our work is on CULA, a GPU accelerated implementation of linear algebra routines. We present results from factorizations such as LU decomposition, singular value decomposition and QR decomposition along with applications like system solution and least squares. The GPU execution model featured by NVIDIA GPUs based on CUDA demands very strong parallelism, requiring between hundreds and thousands of simultaneous operations to achieve high performance. Some constructs from linear algebra map extremely well to the GPU and others map poorly. CPUs, on the other hand, do well at smaller order parallelism and perform acceptably during low-parallelism code segments. Our work addresses this via hybrid a processing model, in which the CPU and GPU work simultaneously to produce results. In many cases, this is accomplished by allowing each platform to do the work it performs most naturally.

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I start with a brief introduction to the graphics processing unit (GPU) as well as general-purpose computation on modern graphics hardware (GPGPU). Next, I explore the motivations for GPGPU programming, and the capabilities of modern GPUs (including advantages and disadvantages). Also, I give the background required for further exploring GPU programming, including the terminology used and the resources available. Finally, I include a comprehensive survey of previous and current GPGPU work, and end with a look at the future of GPU programming.

Using modern Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) becomes very useful for computing complex and time consuming processes. GPUs provide high-performance computation capabilities with a good price. This paper deals with a multi-GPU OpenCL implementation of k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) algorithm. The proposed OpenCL algorithm achieves acceleration up to 750x in comparison with a single thread CPU version. The common k-NN was modified to be faster when the lower number of k neighbors is set. The performance of algorithm was verified with two GPUs dual-core NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 and CPU Intel Core i7 3770 with 4.1 GHz frequency. The results of speed up were measured for one GPU, two GPUs, three and four GPUs. We performed several tests with data sets containing up to 4 million elements with various number of attributes.

Nowadays, Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) dominate in a wide spectrum of computing realms with massive parallel processing capabilities. However, as resources are continuously integrated into GPUs, traditional serial execution often leads to underutilization. Prior studies have shown that allowing multiple kernels to run concurrently and share GPU resources can effectively improve both resource utilization and system throughput. Nonetheless, existing methods for solely automating concurrent kernel execution either schedule kernels within individual applications (i.e., kernel-level) or enable task concurrency across multiple applications (i.e., task-level), thus leaving substantial GPU capacity underexploited. Moreover, they inevitably introduce new programming frameworks, which incur cumbersome manual efforts and further impose substantial programming burdens on developers. To address these limitations, we propose HuntKTm , a hybrid scheduling and automatic management method that cooperates kernel-level and task-level concurrency to enhance system throughput with minimal code modification. Specifically, HuntKTm comprises a stream scheduler to assign kernels, a task scheduler to dispatch tasks onto GPUs, and a memory manager to reduce memory footprint. The stream scheduler applies a strategy to dispatch kernels to hardware queues and adopts a novel algorithm to remove redundant synchronizations in computational flow. Then, the task scheduler automatically issues tasks based on resource requirements and availability to support GPU sharing among uncooperative applications. Finally, the memory manager reduces memory footprint for tasks by limiting the lifetimes of memory objects, which thereby enables more tasks to execute simultaneously. Experimental results demonstrate that HuntKTm improves system throughput by 33.2% over the existing state-of-the-art CASE framework on a single machine equipped with four NVIDIA A100 GPUs and reaches 13.8% higher application-level performance over Taskflow, even with lessened programming efforts.

The increasing adoption of graphics processing units (GPUs) for high-performance computing raises the reliability challenge, which is generally ignored in traditional GPUs. GPUs usually support thousands of parallel threads and require a sizable register file. Such large register file is highly susceptible to soft errors and power-hungry. Although ECC has been adopted to register file in modern GPUs, it causes considerable power overhead, which further increases the power stress. Thus, an energy-efficient soft-error protection mechanism is more desirable. Besides its extremely low leakage power consumption, resistive memory (e.g., spin-transfer torque RAM) is also immune to the radiation induced soft errors due to its magnetic field based storage. In this article, we propose to LEverage reSistive memory to enhance the Soft-error robustness and reduce the power consumption (LESS) of registers in the General-Purpose computing on GPUs (GPGPUs). Since resistive memory experiences longer write latency compared to SRAM, we explore the unique characteristics of GPGPU applications to obtain the win-win gains: achieving the near-full soft-error protection for the register file, and meanwhile substantially reducing the energy consumption with negligible performance degradation. Our experimental results show that LESS is able to mitigate the registers soft-error vulnerability by 86% and achieve 61% energy savings with negligible (e.g., 1%) performance degradation.

To create a fast and generic method with sufficient quality for extracting tubular structures such as blood vessels and airways from different modalities (CT, MR and US) and organs (brain, lungs and liver) by utilizing the computational power of graphic processing units (GPUs). A cropping algorithm is used to remove unnecessary data from the datasets on the GPU. A model-based tube detection filter combined with a new parallel centerline extraction algorithm and a parallelized region growing segmentation algorithm is used to extract the tubular structures completely on the GPU. Accuracy of the proposed GPU method and centerline algorithm is compared with the ridge traversal and skeletonization/thinning methods using synthetic vascular datasets. The implementation is tested on several datasets from three different modalities: airways from CT, blood vessels from MR, and 3D Doppler Ultrasound. The results show that the method is able to extract airways and vessels in 3-5 s on a modern GPU and is less sensitive to noise than other centerline extraction methods. Tubular structures such as blood vessels and airways can be extracted from various organs imaged by different modalities in a matter of seconds, even for large datasets.

Programmable graphics processing units (GPUs) nowadays offer very high performance computing power at relatively low hardware cost and power consumption. In this paper, we present the implementation of the dynamics routine of the HIRLAM weather forecast model on the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 GPU card using the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) as parallel programming model. We converted the original Fortran to C and CUDA by hand, straightforwardly, without much concern about optimization. On a single GPU, we observe speed-ups by an order of magnitude over our hosting CPU (Intel quad core, 1998 MHz). This includes the relatively very costly copying of data between GPU and CPU memories. Calculation times proper decreased by a factor of 2000. A single GPU, however, has not enough memory for practical use. Therefore, we investigated a parallel implementation on 4 GPUs. We found a parallel speed-up of 3.6, which is not very promising if memory limitations force the use of many GPUs in parallel. We discuss several options to solve this issue.

Genetic algorithm based estimation of non–functional properties for GPGPU programs

The solution of tridiagonal system of equations using graphic processing units (GPU) is assessed. The parallel-Thomas-algorithm (PTA) is developed and the solution of PTA is compared to two known parallel algorithms, i.e. cyclic-reduction (CR) and parallel-cyclic-reduction (PCR). Lid-driven cavity problem is considered to assess these parallel approaches. This problem is also simulated using the classic Thomas algorithm that runs on a central processing unit (CPU). Runtimes and physical parameters of the mentioned GPU and CPU algorithms are compared. The results show that the speedup of CR, PCR and PTA against the CPU runtime is 4.4x,5.2x and 38.5x, respectively. Furthermore, the effect of coalesced and uncoalesced memory access to GPU global memory is examined for PTA, and a 2x-speedup is achieved for the coalesced memory access. Additionally, the PTA performance in a time dependent problem, the unsteady flow over a square, is assessed and a 9x-speedup is obtained against the CPU.

Various types of two-body statistics (2-BS) are regarded as essential components of low-level data analysis in scientific database systems. In relational algebraic terms, a 2-BS is essentially a Cartesian product between two datasets (or two instances of the same dataset) followed by a user-defined aggregate. The quadratic complexity of these computations hinders timely processing of data. Use of modern parallel hardware has thus become an obvious solution to meet such challenges. This paper presents our recent work on designing and optimizing parallel algorithms for 2-BS computation on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Although a typical 2-BS problem can be summarized into a straightforward parallel computing pattern, traditional knowledge from (general) parallel computing often falls short in delivering the best possible performance. Therefore, we present a suite of techniques to decompose 2-BS problems and methods for effective use of computing resources on GPUs. We also develop analytical models that guide us towards finding the best parameters of our GPU programs. As a result, we achieve the design of highly-optimized 2-BS algorithms that significantly outperform the best known GPU and CPU implementations. Although 2-BS problems share the same core computations, each 2-BS problem however carries its own characteristics that calls for different strategies in code optimization. For that, we develop a software framework that automatically generates high-performance GPU code based on a few parameters and short primer code input. We further present two case studies to demonstrate that code generated by this framework reaches a very high level of efficiency.

Time-domain circuit simulation is often dominated by the transistor model evaluation time. An analysis of a test suite of 27 circuits shows 66% of the transient runtime is spent evaluating the core BSIM4 transistor model code. A modern graphics processing unit (GPU) is a highly paralled, high performance computer suitable for non-graphics tasks. Circuit simulation is sped up by a factor of 3 to 6, with no loss in accuracy, by moving the transistor evaluation to the NVIDIA GTX 280 GPU. Maximum GPU performance is obtained with single precision arithmetic, so transistor model code should be written with this in mind.

For linear dynamic systems in data processing, Kalman filter (KF) algorithm can produce more precise estimations of unknown variables and analyze complex state transition. For a complex application, the large scale of system states and the less runtime of KF algorithm are necessarily needed. Therefore, more available computing resources are crucial to accelerate computation. This paper presents an optimization method to accelerate the computation of KF using modern graphics processing unit (GPU), and enlarge the scale of the estimations for linear dynamical systems. In addition, some evaluations and tests, which are obtained on different parallel architectures with different number of estimation size, are discussed. The experimental results demonstrate that GPU-based computations are typically faster than the corresponding sequential execution for different datasets, and the maximum speedup is 50x in the test environment. Furthermore, it shows a scalable speedup by GPU with enlarging the scale of estimate size within the GPU memory limitation.