GPGPU
General-Purpose Computation Using Graphics Hardware

Introduction

GPGPU stands for General-Purpose computation on GPUs. With the increasing programmability of commodity graphics processing units (GPUs), these chips are capable of performing more than the specific graphics computations for which they were designed. They are now capable coprocessors, and their high speed makes them useful for a variety of applications. The goal of this page is to catalog the current and historical use of GPUs for general-purpose computation.

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Co-Processor Acceleration of an Unmodified Parallel Solid Mechanics Code with FEASTGPU

FEAST is a hardware-oriented MPI-based Finite Element solver toolkit. With the extension FEASTGPU the authors have previously demonstrated that significant speed-ups in the solution of the scalar Poisson problem can be achieved by the addition of GPUs as scientific co-processors to a commodity based cluster. In this paper the authors put the more general claim to the test: Applications based on FEAST, that ran only on CPUs so far, can be successfully accelerated on a co-processor enhanced cluster without any code modifications. The chosen solid mechanics code has higher accuracy requirements and a more diverse CPU/co-processor interaction than the Poisson example, and is thus better suited to assess the practicability of the acceleration approach. The paper presents accuracy experiments, a scalability test and acceleration results for different elastic objects under load. In particular, it demonstrates in detail that the single precision execution of the co-processor does not affect the final accuracy. The paper establishes how the local acceleration gains of factors 5.5 to 9.0 translate into 1.6- to 2.6-fold total speed-up. Subsequent analysis reveals which measures will increase these factors further. (Dominik Göddeke, Hilmar Wobker, Robert Strzodka, Jamaludin Mohd-Yusof, Patrick McCormick, Stefan Turek. Co-Processor Acceleration of an Unmodified Parallel Solid Mechanics Code with FEASTGPU. International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering (to appear).)

Posted: 06 Jun 2008 [GPGPU /Scientific Computing] #


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