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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SIGGRAPH 2004 GPGPU COURSE

Welcome to the course notes and supplementary materials for the full-day SIGGRAPH 2004 GPGPU course!

The course will be held at SIGGRAPH 2004 on Wednesday, August 11, 2004.

The graphics processor (GPU) on today's commodity video cards has evolved into an extremely powerful and flexible processor. The latest graphics architectures provide tremendous memory bandwidth and computational horsepower, with fully programmable vertex and pixel processing units that support vector operations up to full IEEE floating point precision. High level languages have emerged for graphics hardware, making this computational power accessible. Architecturally, GPUs are highly parallel streaming processors optimized for vector operations, with both MIMD (vertex) and SIMD (pixel) pipelines. Not surprisingly, these processors are capable of general-purpose computation beyond the graphics applications for which they were designed. Researchers have found that exploiting the GPU can accelerate some problems by over an order of magnitude over the CPU.

However, significant barriers still exist for the developer who wishes to use the inexpensive power of commodity graphics hardware, whether for in-game simulation of physics of for conventional computational science. These chips are designed for and driven by video game development; the programming model is unusual, the programming environment is tightly constrained, and the underlying architectures are largely secret. The GPU developer must be an expert in computer graphics and its computational idioms to make effective use of the hardware, and still pitfalls abound. This course provides a detailed introduction to general purpose computation on graphics hardware (GPGPU). We emphasize core computational building blocks, ranging from linear algebra to database queries, and review the tools, perils, and tricks of the trade in GPU programming. Finally we present some interesting and important case studies on general-purpose applications of graphics hardware.

The course presenters are experts on general-purpose GPU computation from academia and industry, and have presented papers and tutorials on the topic at SIGGRAPH, Graphics Hardware, Game Developers Conference, and elsewhere.

Mark Harris, NVIDIA Corporation (UK)
David Luebke, University of Virginia

Ian Buck, Stanford University
Naga Govindaraju, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Mark Harris, NVIDIA Corporation (UK)
Jens Kruger, TU-Munich Computer Graphics & Visualization group
Aaron Lefohn, University of California Davis
David Luebke, University of Virginia
Tim Purcell, Stanford University
Cliff Woolley, University of Virginia

Presentations

• Introduction
• GPGPU Building Blocks
  • Mapping computational concepts to the GPU
  • Linear algebra  (notes)
  • Sorting and searching
  • Database Operations
• High-level Languages and Debugging Tools
  • High-level languages
  • Debugging
• Effective GPGPU Programming: Tricks and Traps
  • Efficient data-parallel GPU programming
  • Data formatting and addressing
  • GPU computation strategies and tricks
• GPGPU Case Studies
  • Physically-based simulation on GPUs
  • Tone mapping on GPUs
  • Level sets on GPUs
  • Global Illumination on GPUs
• Tools and Links

Jump to...

Course Abstract
Course Organizers
Course Speakers
Course Outline

Links

High-Level Shading Languages


• Cg: C for Graphics
  
• HLSL: The D3D Shading Language
  
• The OpenGL Shading Language
  

GPGPU Languages


• Sh - University of Waterloo
  
• Brook - Stanford University
  

Shader Conversion


• Babelshader
  

Debugging Tools


• imdebug
  
• Shadesmith
  

Utility Code


• RenderTexture