On 4-5 August 2007, San Diego hosted the annual Graphics Hardware conference. GPGPU figured prominently in three papers:

• As transistors get smaller, their transient failure rates increase. Future architectures must adapt to address the resulting reliability problems. Jeremy Sheaffer presented a paper demonstrating a hardware-based redundancy approach to ensure reliability on GPGPU applications. (“A Hardware Redundancy and Recovery Mechanism for Reliable Scientific Computation on Graphics Processors”. Jeremy Sheaffer, University of Virginia; David Luebke, NVIDIA Research; Kevin Skadron, University of Virginia.)
• Magnus Strengert presented a generic, minimally intrusive, and application-transparent GLSL debugger that operates transparently to the application. In it, shader debugging is performed on a per-draw call level; it allows singlestepping and the inspection of arbitrary variable content. Linux code is available and Windows code is expected by the end of the year. (“A Hardware-Aware Debugger for the OpenGL Shading Language”. Magnus Strengert, Thomas Klein, and Thomas Ertl, University of Stuttgart.)
• One critical need for GPGPU developers is a library of general-purpose building blocks for GPU computation. Shubhabrata Sengupta presented a paper describing a GPU implementation of the “scan primitives” and their use in novel GPU implementations of quicksort, efficient sparse matrix-vector multiplication, and tridiagonal matrix systems. This paper won the Best Paper award and the authors are preparing an open-source release. (“Scan Primitives for GPU Computing”. Shubhabrata Sengupta, UC Davis; Mark Harris, NVIDIA Corporation; Yao Zhang, UC Davis; John D. Owens, UC Davis.)

All Graphics Hardware 2007 papers are available in the ACM digital library. In addition, the GH07 program page contains slides for all talks as well as two keynote talks (Chas. Boyd of the Microsoft DirectX team: “Mass Market Applications of Data-Parallel Computing” and Michael Jones, chief technologist of Google Earth: “GPUs for the true mass market”) and vendor talks from AMD and NVIDIA about their latest processors (AMD Radeon HD 2900 and NVIDIA’s Tesla).