Sudipto Guha, Shankar Krishnan and Suresh Venkatasubramanian are presenting a tutorial on the use of the GPU for data visualization and mining at the ACM International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2005). ( Data Visualization and Mining on the GPU)

Once again this year ACM SIGGRAPH will feature a full-day course titled "GPGPU: General-Purpose Computing on Graphics Hardware". The course, organized by Mark Harris of NVIDIA and David Luebke of the University of Virginia, will feature GPGPU experts from industry and academia. The course will discuss core computational building blocks such as sorting, searching, and linear algebra, using case studies ranging from adaptive shadow mapping to database queries and data mining. Particular focus will be given to tools, perils, and tricks of the trade in general-purpose GPU programming. The course has been updated from SIGGRAPH 2004, with all new case studies.(http://www.gpgpu.org/s2005)

Genetic Algorithms (GA) comprise a class of evolutionary computation (EC). A difficulty with GA is that the traditional crossover operation introduces order-dependency and hence an increase in rendering passes on SIMD GPUs. To parallelize EC on GPUs, this project proposes to use another class of EC called Evolutionary Programming (EP), which applies mutations locally. The project studies in-depth how to efficiently map an EP algorithm to SIMD GPUs, including a scalable and visualizable genome map, mutation, tournament and selection, and finally convergence visualization. Intensive experiments and careful comparisons are conducted to demonstrate its performance speedup and accuracy. The project also shows that it is conceptually wrong and infeasible to generate high-quality random numbers on the current generation of GPUs and that the low-quality random numbers will lead to poor performance of EC. (K. L. Fok, T. T. Wong, and M. L. Wong, "Evolutionary Computing on Consumer-Level Graphics Hardware", IEEE Intelligent Systems, and "Parallel Evolutionary Algorithms on Graphics Processing Unit" in Proc. of IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2005.)