KOAP, pronounced “cope,” is a tool for developing OpenCL applications. It’s purpose is to allow the programmer to aggregate and simplify calls to the OpenCL API. KOAP accepts as input a file containing (or including) both the OpenCL program and the host C program. KOAP understands several directives, each of which is prefixed with a $ character. When KOAP is run, these directives are replaced with the requisite OpenCL API calls. Programs preprocessed by KOAP can run on any target supported by OpenCL, including both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs.

KOAP is now freely available as a source code tar file from http://aggregate.org/KOAP/.

Support for several types of compression has been added to the GPU-based database engine ålenkå . Supported algorithms include FOR (frame of reference), FOR-DELTA and dictionary compression. All compression algorithms run on the GPU achieving gigabytes per second compression and decompression speed. The use of compression allows to significantly reduce or eliminate I/O bottlenecks in analytical queries as shown by ålenkå’s results in the Star Schema and TPC-H benchmarks.

The 4th Workshop on using Emerging Parallel Architectures (WEPA 2012) is held in conjunction with the International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS 2012), Omaha, Nebraska, June 2-4, 2011.

The computing landscape has undergone significant transformation with the emergence of more powerful processing elements such as GPUs, FPGAs, multi-cores, etc. On the multi-core front, Moore’s Law has transcended beyond the single processor boundary with the prediction that the number of cores will double every 18 months. Going forward, the primary method of gaining processor performance will be through parallelism. Multi-core technology has visibly penetrated the global market. Accordingly to the latest Top500 lists the HPC landscape has evolved from supercomputer systems into large clusters of dual or quad-core processors. Furthermore, GPUs, FPGAs and multi-cores have been shown to be formidable computing alternatives, where certain classes of applications witness more than one order of magnitude improvement over their GPP counterpart. Therefore, future computational science centers will employ resources such as FPGA and GPU architectures to serve as co-processors to offload appropriate compute-intensive portions of applications from the servers. Read the rest of this entry »

From a recent press release:

Taipei, November 18, 2011: Zillians, a leading cloud solution provider specializing in high performance computing, GPU virtualization middleware and massive multi-player online game (MMOG) platforms today announced the availability of vGPU – the world’s first commercial virtualization solution for decoupling GPU hardware from software. Traditionally, physical GPUs must reside on the same machine running GPU code. This severely hampers GPU cloud deployment due to the difficulty of dynamic GPU provisioning. With vGPU technology, bulky hardware is no longer a limiting factor. vGPU introduces a thin, transparent RPC layer between local application and remote GPU, enabling existing GPU software to run without any modification on a remote GPU resource. Read the rest of this entry »

ClusterChimps.org has released a step by step guide to integrating CUDA with GNU Autotools. The guide covers building stand alone CUDA binaries, static CUDA libraries, shared CUDA libraries and comes with an example tarball. For more information go to http://www.clusterchimps.org/autotools.php

Abstract

A GPU-based parallel star retrieval method is proposed to improve the efficiency of searching stars from star catalogue in computer simulation, especially when the FOV (Field of View) is large. By the novel algorithm, the stars in catalogue are classified and stored in different zones using latitude and longitude zoning method firstly. Based on the easily accessible star catalogue, the star zones that FOV covers can be computed exactly by constructing a spherical triangle around the FOV. As a result, the searching scope is reduced effectively. Finally, we use CUDA computation architecture to run the process of star retrieving from those star zones parallel on GPU. Experimental results show that, in comparison with CPU-oriented implementation, the proposed algorithm achieves up to tens of times speedup, and the processing time is limited within a millisecond level in large FOV and wide star magnitude span. It meets the requirement of real-time simulation.

(Chao Li, Liqiang Zhang, Jiaze Wu, and Changwen Zheng, “Parallel Accelerating for Star Catalogue Retrieval Algorithm using GPUs”, Journal of Astronautics, 2012)

Abstract

In order to test the function and performance of star sensor on the ground, a fast method for simulating star map is presented. The algorithm adopts instantanesous coordinate of star and improves the star searching efficiency by optimizing the zone partitioning method for star catalogue. We overcome the low accuracy of the latitude and longitude’s span that FOV overlays by proposing a new spherical right-angled triangle method and the searching scope is reduced highly; meanwhile, the simulation model for star brightness is also built based on adopted star catalogue. Simulation study is conducted for the demonstration of the algorithm. The proposed approach meets the requirement of wide magnitude range and short simulation period.

(Chao Li, Changwen Zheng, Jiaze Wu, and Liqiang Zhang, “A fast algorithm of simulating star map for star sensor”, Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE International Conferernce on Computer and Network Technology (IEEE ICCNT), 2011)

Abstract:

Implementations of the Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) interface are major building block of dense linear algebra (DLA) libraries, and therefore have to be highly optimized. We present some techniques and implementations that significantly accelerate the corresponding routines from currently available libraries for GPUs. In particular, Pointer Redirecting – a set of GPU specific optimization techniques –allows us to easily remove performance oscillations associated with problem dimensions not divisible by fixed blocking sizes. For example, applied to the matrix-matrix multiplication routines, depending on the hardware configuration and routine parameters, this can lead to two times faster algorithms. Similarly, the matrix-vector multiplication can be accelerated more than two times in both single and double precision arithmetic. Additionally, GPU specific acceleration techniques are applied to develop new kernels (e.g. syrk, symv) that are up to 20x faster than the currently available kernels. We present these kernels and also show their acceleration e!ect to higher level dense linear algebra routines. The accelerated kernels are now freely available through the MAGMA BLAS library.

(R. Nath, S. Tomov and J. Dongarra: “Accelerating GPU Kernels for Dense Linear Algebra”, VECPAR 2010. [PDF])

Abstract:

We present an improved matrix–matrix multiplication routine (General Matrix Multiply [GEMM]) in the MAGMA BLAS library that targets the NVIDIA Fermi graphics processing units (GPUs) using Compute Unified Data Architecture (CUDA). We show how to modify the previous MAGMA GEMM kernels in order to make a more efficient use of the Fermi’s new architectural features, most notably their extended memory hierarchy and memory sizes. The improved kernels run at up to 300 GFlop/s in double precision and up to 645 GFlop/s in single precision arithmetic (on a C2050), which is correspondingly 58% and 63% of the theoretical peak. We compare the improved kernels with the currently available version in CUBLAS 3.1. Further, we show the effect of the new kernels on higher-level dense linear algebra (DLA) routines such as the one-sided matrix factorizations, and compare their performances with corresponding, currently available routines running on homogeneous multicore systems.

(R. Nath and S. Tomov and J. Dongarra: “An Improved MAGMA GEMM For Fermi Graphics Processing Units”,  International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications. 24(4), 511-515, 2010. [DOI] [PREPRINT])

Paper submission is now open for GPGPU5 which will be held March 3, 2012 in London, UK, and co-located with ACM ASPLOS XVII. The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum to discuss new and emerging general-purpose purpose programming environments and platforms, as well as evaluate applications that have been able to harness the horsepower provided by these platforms. This year’s work is particularly interested on new heterogeneous GPU platforms. For more information, visit: www.ece.neu.edu/GPGPU/GPGPU5