SpeedIT 2.0 and the SpeedIT plugin to OpenFOAM have been released. New features include:

• One of the fastest Sparse Matrix Vector Multiplication worldwide.
• Faster Conjugate Gradient and BiConjugate Gradient solvers.
• State-of-the-art CMRS format for storing sparse matrices. The format requires less memory than CRS or HYB (from CUSPARSE and CUSP).
• Faster acceleration in OpenFOAM (Computational Fluid Dynamics).

More information is available at http://speed-it.vratis.com.

High Performance Graphics is the leading international forum for performance-oriented graphics systems research including innovative algorithms, efficient implementations, and hardware architecture. The conference brings together researchers, engineers, and architects to discuss the complex interactions of massively parallel hardware, novel programming models, efficient graphics algorithms, and novel applications. HPG2012, which will take place on June 25-27, is co-located with the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering in Paris, France.

Original and innovative performance-oriented contributions from all areas of graphics are cordially invited for both the papers and the posters track. Please refer to the conference website, located at http://www.highperformancegraphics.org, for more details and the full call.

In recent years, utilizing Graphics Processing Units for general processing has become a very popular approach to obtain low-cost high performance computing applications. Algorithms from many computer science application domains have been adapted to utilize GPUs to increase the efficiency of processing. Unfortunately, while other application domains strongly benefit from utilizing the GPUs, databases related applications seem not to get enough attention. The main goal of GPUs in Databases workshop is to fill this gap. This event is devoted to sharing the knowledge related to applying GPUs in Database environments and to discuss possible future development of this application domain.

The list of topics includes: data compression on GPU, GPUs in databases and data warehouses, data mining using GPUs, stream processing, applications of GPUs in bioinformatics and data oriented GPU primitives.

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Partnering with NVIDIA and Microsoft, this four-day CUDA training course is designed for GPU Programmers in the oil-and-gas industry who are looking to develop comprehensive skills in writing and optimizing applications that fully leverage the many-core processing capabilities of the GPU.

Partnering with NVIDIA and Microsoft, this four-day CUDA training course is designed for GPU Programmers who are looking to develop comprehensive skills in writing and optimizing applications that fully leverage the many-core processing capabilities of the GPU.

Chai is a new managed platform for GPGPU. It is a free and open source clean room workalike of the PeakStream platform. While not production-ready, the just-released alpha version is able to compile and run non-trivial PeakStream demo code on AMD and NVIDIA GPUs (e.g. conjugate gradient).

Chai combines an application virtual machine, garbage collection, auto-tuning JIT compiler, and high level array programming language implemented as an embedded domain-specific language in C++. The JIT back-end uses expectation-maximization to auto-tune and generate vectorized OpenCL. The JIT includes auto-tuned model families for GEMM and GEMV. Although originally developed for AMD GPUs, these parameterized kernel families also generalize to NVIDIA GPUs.

Abstract:

We describe our FE-gMG solver, a finite element geometric multigrid approach for problems relying on unstructured grids. We augment our GPU- and multicore-oriented implementation technique based on cascades of sparse matrix-vector multiplication by applying strong smoothers. In particular, we employ Sparse Approximate Inverse (SPAI) and Stabilised Approximate Inverse (SAINV) techniques. We focus on presenting the numerical efficiency of our smoothers in combination with low- and high-order finite element spaces as well as the hardware efficiency of the FE-gMG. For a representative problem and computational grids in 2D and 3D, we achieve a speedup of an average of 5 on a single GPU over a multithreaded CPU code in our benchmarks. In addition, our strong smoothers can deliver a speedup of 3-5 depending on the element space, compared to simple Jacobi smoothing. This can even be enhanced to a factor of 7 when combining the usage of Approximate Inverse-based smoothers with clever sorting of the degrees of freedom. In total the FE-gMG solver can outperform a simple, (multicore-)CPU-based multigrid by a total factor of over 40.

(Markus Geveler, Dirk Ribbrock, Dominik Göddeke, Peter Zajac and Stefan Turek: “Towards a complete FEM-based simulation toolkit on GPUs: Unstructured Grid Finite Element Geometric Multigrid solvers with strong smoothers based on Sparse Approximate Inverses”, accepted for publication in Computers and Fluids, 2011. [preprint])

OpenCL Studio integrates OpenCL and OpenGL into a single development environment for high performance computing. The feature rich editor, interactive scripting language and extensible plug-in architecture support the rapid development of complex parallel algorithms and accompanying visualizations. Version 2.0 now conforms to the Lua plug-in architecture and closely integrates the open-source libCL parallel algorithm library. A complete version of OpenCL Studio is freely available for download at www.opencldev.com, including instructional videos and technology showcases.

VMD is a popular molecular visualization and analysis program used by thousands of researchers worldwide. VMD accelerates many of the most computationally demanding visualization and analysis features using GPU computing techqniques, resulting in improved performance and new capabilities beyond what is possible using only conventional multi-core CPUs. VMD 1.9.1 advances these capabilities further with a CUDA implementation of the new QuickSurf molecular surface representation, enabling smooth interactive animation of moderate sized biomolecular complexes consisting of a few hundred thousand to one million atoms, and allowing interactive display of molecular surfaces for static structures of very large complexes containing tens of millions of atoms, e.g. large virus capsids.

More information: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/vmd-1.9.1/

CLOGS is a library for higher-level operations on top of the OpenCL C++ API. It is designed to integrate with other OpenCL code, including synchronization using OpenCL events. Currently only two operations are supported: radix sorting and exclusive scan. Radix sort supports all the unsigned integral types as keys, and all the built-in scalar and vector types suitable for storage in buffers as values. Scan supports all the integral types. It also supports vector types, which allows for limited multi-scan capabilities.

Version 1.0 of the library has just been released. The home page is http://clogs.sourceforge.net/