This report describes advantages of using GPUs for analytical queries. It compares performance of the Alenka database engine using a GPU with the performance of Oracle on a  SPARC server. More information on Alenka including source code: https://github.com/antonmks/Alenka

Together with EuroPar-12, the 5th Workshop on UnConventional High Performance Computing 2012 (UCHPC 2012) will take place on August 27/28 at Rhodes Island, Greece. The workshop tries to capture solutions for HPC which are unconventional today but could become conventional and significant tomorrow. While GPGPU is already used a lot in HPC, there still are all kind of issues around best exploitation and productivity for the programmer. Submission deadline: June 6, 2012. For more details, see
http://www.lrr.in.tum.de/~weidendo/uchpc12

Abstract:

Motivation: New high-throughput sequencing technologies have promoted the production of short reads with dramatically low unit cost. The explosive growth of short read datasets poses a challenge to the mapping of short reads to reference genomes, such as the human genome, in terms of alignment quality and execution speed.

Results: We present CUSHAW, a parallelized short read aligner based on the compute unified device architecture (CUDA) parallel programming model. We exploit CUDA-compatible graphics hardware as accelerators to achieve fast speed. Our algorithm employs a quality-aware bounded search approach based on the Burrows- Wheeler transform (BWT) and the Ferragina Manzini (FM)-index to reduce the search space and achieve high alignment quality. Performance evaluation, using simulated as well as real short read datasets, reveals that our algorithm running on one or two graphics processing units (GPUs) achieves significant speedups in terms of execution time, while yielding comparable or even better alignment quality for paired-end alignments compared to three popular BWT-based aligners: Bowtie, BWA and SOAP2. CUSHAW also delivers competitive performance in terms of SNP calling for an E.coli test dataset.

Availability: http://cushaw.sourceforge.net.

(Y. Liu, B. Schmidt, D. Maskell: “CUSHAW: a CUDA compatible short read aligner to large genomes based on the Burrows-Wheeler transform”, Bioinformatics, 2012. [DOI])

Submissions are cordially invited for MCC-III, to be held in Stuttgart, Germany, September 19-21. This conference is the 3rd in a series, starting in 2010 in Heidelberg at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences (HAW) and 2011 at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the Engineering Mathematics and Computing Lab (EMCL). It aims to combine new aspects of multi-/manycore microprocessor technologies, parallel applications, numerical simulation, software development and tools. Contributions are welcome from all participating disciplines. Particular emphasis is placed on the support and advancement of young scientists, in addition to high-quality invited keynote talks and tutorials. More information including the full call for papers, topics of interest and submission instructions: http://www.multicore-challenge.org

The rCUDA Team is proud to announce a new version of the rCUDA framework which will include many new functionalities as well as boosted performance. This new version, cooked for over a year, will incorporate pipelined transfers, full multi-thread and multi-node capabilities, CUDA 4.1 support, global scheduler integration, support for CUDA C extensions, and native InfiniBand support. A closed beta teting program has been started. See the complete text at http://www.rcuda.net/index.php/news/19-new-revolutionary-version-of-rcuda-to-be-launched.html.

Abstract:

Breadth-first search (BFS) is a core primitive for graph traversal and a basis for many higher-level graph analysis algorithms. It is also representative of a class of parallel computations whose memory accesses and work distribution are both irregular and data-dependent. Recent work has demonstrated the plausibility of GPU sparse graph traversal, but has tended to focus on asymptotically inefficient algorithms that perform poorly on graphs with non-trivial diameter.

We present a BFS parallelization focused on fine-grained task management constructed from efficient prefix sum that achieves an asymptotically optimal O(|V|+|E|) work complexity. Our implementation delivers excellent performance on diverse graphs, achieving traversal rates in excess of 3.3 billion and 8.3 billion traversed edges per second using single and quad-GPU configurations, respectively. This level of performance is several times faster than state-of-the-art implementations both CPU and GPU platforms.

(Duane Merrill, Michael Garland and  Andrew Grimshaw: “Scalable GPU graph traversal”, Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP’12), pp.117-128, Feburary 2012. [DOI])

UKPEW is the leading UK forum for the presentation of all aspects of performance modeling and analysis of computer and telecommunication systems. Original papers are invited on all relevant topics but papers on or related to the subjects listed below are particularly welcome.

The paper submission deadline has just been extended to April 20, 2012. The conference takes place June 2 and 3, 2012, in Edinburgh, UK. More Information: http://www.ukpew.org

Accelerate your science on the Titan Supercomputer later this year, by harnessing up to 20 petaflops of parallel processing using GPUs. Open to researchers from academia, government labs, and industry, the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program is the major means by which the scientific community gains access to some of the fastest supercomputers.

First, let INCITE know you are interested in GPU acceleration by completing a two-minute survey. Then determine if you want to submit a formal proposal by June 27, 2012.

Need help drafting your proposal? Attend a “how-to” webinar on Tuesday, April 24 to learn tips and tricks for drafting your proposal. For further questions about the call for proposals, please contact the INCITE manager at INCITE@DOEleadershipcomputing.org.

Abstract:

We present a new adaptive format for storing sparse matrices on GPU. We compare it with several other formats including CUSPARSE which is today probably the best choice for processing of sparse matrices on GPU in CUDA. Contrary to CUSPARSE which works with common CSR format, our new format requires conversion. However, multiplication of sparse-matrix and vector is significantly faster for many matrices. We demonstrate it on a set of 1600 matrices and we show for what types of matrices our format is profitable.

(Heller M., Oberhuber T., “Adaptive Row-Grouped CSR Format For Storing of Sparse Matrices on GPU“, preprint on Arxiv.org 2012, [PDF])

Abstract:

Modern GPUs are well suited for performing image processing tasks. We utilize their high computational performance and memory bandwidth for image segmentation purposes. We segment cardiac MRI data by means of numerical solution of an anisotropic partial differential equation of the Allen-Cahn type. We implement two different algorithms for solving the equation on the CUDA architecture. One of them is based on the Runge-Kutta-Merson method for the approximation of solutions of ordinary differential equations, the other uses the GMRES method for the numerical solution of systems of linear equations. In our experiments, the CUDA implementations of both algorithms are about 3–9 times faster than corresponding 12-threaded OpenMP implementations.

(Oberhuber T., Suzuki A., Vacata J., Žabka V., “Image segmentation using CUDA implementations of the Runge-Kutta-Merson and GMRES methods“, Journal of Math-for-Industry, 2011, vol. 3, pp. 73–79 [PDF])