Vision4ce launched a new line of General-purpose Rugged Image Processing (GRIP) products at the recent SPIE Defense and Security Symposium in Orlando from 18th-20th March 2008. The GRIP-Beta showed cutting edge GPGPU-based image processing demonstrations, analog and Gigabit Ethernet video streams and the robust functionality in the Gripworkx image processing framework. The Vision4ce team with GRIP now addresses numerous rugged embedded computing challenges with a cost effective, readily available rugged solution that might normally be served by more expensive and lengthy FPGA approaches. See www.vision4ce.com for more information.

Version 1.0 alpha of CUDPP, the CUDA Data-Parallel Algorithms Library, has been released. This version adds the segmented scan algorithm and sparse matrix-vector multiplication to CUDPP’s repertoire. Other new features include an improved “plan”-based configuration interface, an improved scan algorithm for higher performance, support for more inclusive scans and more scan operators, an improved stream compaction interface. In addition, CUDPP 1.0a adds support for CUDA 2.0 and the Windows Vista and Mac OS X (10.5.2 and higher) operating systems. CUDPP works with NVIDIA CUDA versions 1.1 and higher.

Shader Maker is a simple, cross-platform GLSL editor. It works on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. Shader Maker provides the basics of a shader editor, such that students can get started with writing their own shaders as quickly as possible. This includes: syntax highlighting in the GLSL editors; vertex, fragment, and geometry shader editors; interactive editing of uniform variables; light source parameters; pre-defined simple shapes (e.g., torus); a simple OBJ loader; and more. (Shader Maker)

The new gDEBugger V4.0 introduces gDEBugger Linux. This new exciting product adds 32-bit and 64-bit Linux Support, bringing all of gDEBugger’s debugging and profiling abilities to the Linux OpenGL developers’ world. A new Texture and Buffer Viewer has been added. This Viewer allows you to view textures, static buffers and pbuffers as images or raw data in its original format, including non-RGB data formats (float, depth, integer, luminance, etc). This version also includes significant performance improvements. gDEBugger, an OpenGL and OpenGL ES debugger and profiler, traces application activity on top of the OpenGL API to let programmers see what is happening within the graphics system implementation to find bugs and optimize OpenGL application performance. (http://www.gremedy.com)

The Smith-Waterman algorithm has been available for more than 25 years. It is based on a dynamic programming approach that explores all the possible alignments between two biological sequences; as a result it returns the optimal local alignment. Unfortunately, the computational cost is very high, requiring a number of operations proportional to the product of the length of two sequences. This paper by Svetlin Manavski and Giorgio Valle describes SmithWaterman-CUDA, an open-source project to perform fast sequence alignment on the GPU. Although the software performs the optimal Smith-Waterman alignment it is faster than heuristics approaches like FASTA and BLAST. The tests on protein data banks show up to 30x speed up related to reference CPU implementations. (Svetlin A. Manavski, Giorgio Valle, CUDA compatible GPU cards as efficient hardware accelerators for Smith-Waterman sequence alignment, BMC Bioinformatics 2008, 9(Suppl 2):S10 (26 March 2008))

Abstract: “We present a novel design and implementation of relational join algorithms for new-generation graphics processing units (GPUs). Taking advantage of GPU features, we design a set of data-parallel primitives such as split and sort, and use these primitives to implement indexed or non-indexed nested-loop, sort-merge and hash joins. Our algorithms utilize the high parallelism as well as the high memory bandwidth of the GPU, and use parallel computation and memory optimizations to effectively reduce memory stalls. We have implemented our algorithms on a PC with an NVIDIA G80 GPU and an Intel quad-core CPU. Our GPU-based join algorithms are able to achieve a performance improvement of 2-7X over their optimized CPU-based counterparts. (Bingsheng He, Ke Yang, Rui Fang, Mian Lu, Naga K. Govindaraju, Qiong Luo, and Pedro V. Sander. Relational Joins on Graphics Processors. ACM SIGMOD 2008.)

Abstract: Mackey-Glass chaotic time series prediction and nuclear protein classification show the feasibility of evaluating genetic programming populations directly on parallel consumer gaming graphics processing units. Using a Linux KDE computer equipped with an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX graphics processing unit card the C++ SPMD interpretter evolves programs at Giga GP operations per second (895 million GPops). We use the RapidMind general processing on GPU (GPGPU) framework to evaluate an entire population of a quarter of a million individual programs on a non-trivial problem in 4 seconds. An efficient reverse polish notation (RPN) tree based GP is given. (A SIMD interpreter for Genetic Programming on GPU Graphics Cards. W.B. Langdon and W. Banzhaf. In M. Neill, L. Vanneschi, A.I. Esparcia Alcazar, S. Gustafson eds., EuroGP 2008, pp73-85. Springer, LNCS 4971, 26-28 March, Naples.)

This thesis presents a GPU implementation of the Livewire algorithm. The algorithm is divided in three phases: Sobel or Laplacian filter convolution, image modeling as a grid graph and solving the non-negative weighted edges single-source shortest path problem. In order to calculate the shortest path, an adapted version of the delta-stepping algorithm was developed for GPUs, using CUDA. A critical result analysis shows that intense speedups are seen in image filtering algorithms. On the other hand, the wide use of dependent device memory look-ups has constrained delta-stepping algorithm from achieving higher performance than CPU implementation although a better performance is expected for wider graphs. Besides showing the viability of the Livewire algorithm implementation, this thesis makes available an open-source image segmentation GPU based application, which can be used as example for future GPU algorithm implementations at http://code.google.com/p/gpuwire/.

Ivan Ufimtsev and Todd Martínez at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have implemented an efficient method of calculating two-electron repulsion integrals over Gaussian basis functions on the GPU. Virtually all modern quantum chemical calculations require evaluating millions to billions of these integrals. This problem turns out to be well-suited to the massively parallel architecture of GPUs by an appropriate partitioning of the problem. A benchmark test performed for the evaluation of approximately one million (ss|ss) integrals over contracted s-orbitals showed that a naïve algorithm implemented on the GPU achieves up to 130-fold speedup over a traditional CPU implementation on an AMD Opteron. Subsequent calculations on a 256-atom DNA strand show that the GPU advantage is maintained for basis sets including higher angular momentum functions. (Quantum Chemistry on Graphical Processing Units. 1. Strategies for Two-Electron Integral Evaluation, Ivan S. Ufimtsev and Todd J. Martínez, J. Chem. Theory Comput., 4 (2), 222 -231, 2008. doi:10.1021/ct700268q)