Please join us next week in Tampa, Florida at Supercomputing 2006 for a full-day GPGPU Tutorial on Sunday, November 12 2006. This is the continuation of a series of well-regarded courses presented at the SIGGRAPH and IEEE Visualization conferences. The course at SC06 has been updated for the Supercomputing audience with the latest results and techniques. Then, on Monday November 13, plan to attend the SC06 Workshop, “General-Purpose GPU Computing: Practice and Experience”. This workshop features invited speakers and poster presenters who provide insights into current GPGPU practice and experience, and chart future directions in heterogeneous and homogeneous multi-core processor architectures and data-parallel processor architectures such as GPUs.

• Location: Boston Convention and Exhibition Center
• Room: Room 108
• Date: Thursday, August 3rd
• Time: 11am-1:00pm

Since there is not a GPGPU course offering at SIGGRAPH this year, we have scheduled a GPGPU “Birds of a Feather” (BOF) for everyone interested in GPGPU at SIGGRAPH. The current plan is for the BOF to be an informal gathering to chat about GPGPU. Many of the academics doing research in GPGPU plan to be there, as well as industry folks, including ATI and NVIDIA.

Since the BOF is scheduled during lunch, it will be a “brown bag” event, so bring lunch with you. We’ll keep you updated on any status changes in the forums. (Credit goes to Mike Houston for organizing.)

To focus and facilitate research on real-time ray tracing, a new forum is being created for this rapidly developing field: the 2006 IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing, sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society and the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee (pending). The Call For Participation is now online and contributions on Ray Tracing on GPUs are invited.

The complete course notes have been posted for the full-day GPGPU course held at IEEE Visualization 2005. The course titled, “GPGPU: General Purpose Computing on Graphics Processors” was held on Sunday, October 23rd, 2005 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The course begins with the architectural, economic, and programmatic motivations behind GPGPU. It then introduces the GPGPU programming model and describes GPGPU languages (Brook, Scout) as well as high-level data structures. Mathematical and algorithmic primitives are then presented, followed by descriptions of many of the low-level technical details required for effective real-world GPGPU programming. The course concludes with several case studies and a disscusion of the future architectual, application, and research possibilities for GPGPU. The course organizer was Aaron Lefohn, and the presenters were Ian Buck, Aaron Lefohn, John Owens, Tim Purcell, Patrick McCormick, and Robert Strzodka. ( “GPGPU: General
Purpose Computing on Graphics Processors,” IEEE Visualization 2005)

Once again this year ACM SIGGRAPH will feature a full-day course titled “GPGPU: General-Purpose Computing on Graphics Hardware”. The course, organized by Mark Harris of NVIDIA and David Luebke of the University of Virginia, will feature GPGPU experts from industry and academia. The course will discuss core computational building blocks such as sorting, searching, and linear algebra, using case studies ranging from adaptive shadow mapping to database queries and data mining. Particular focus will be given to tools, perils, and tricks of the trade in general-purpose GPU programming. The course has been updated from SIGGRAPH 2004, with all new case studies. (http://www.gpgpu.org/s2005)

The complete course notes have been posted for the full-day GPGPU course held at IEEE Visualization 2004. The course, titled “GPGPU: General-Purpose Computing on Graphics Processors“, was held on Monday, October 11th, 2004 in Austin, Texas. The course begins with the architectural, economic, and programmatic motivations behind GPGPU. It then introduces a “hello world” GPGPU example and describes the stream programming model in detail (including Brook). Mathematical and algorithmic primitives are then presented, followed by descriptions of many of the low-level technical details required for effective real-world GPGPU programming. The course concludes with several case studies and a disscusison of the future architectual, application, and research possibilities for GPGPU. The course organizer was Aaron Lefohn, and the presenters were Ian Buck, Aaron Lefohn, John Owens, and Robert Strzodka. ( “GPGPU: General-Purpose Computing on Graphics Processors,” IEEE Visualization 2004)

This talk by John Owens of UC Davis discusses trends in GPU architecture and their current and potential uses for high-performance computing. The invited talk was given at the Eighth Annual Workshop on High-Performance Embedded Computing (HPEC 2004). (GPUs: Engines for Future High-Performance Computing)

Established by NVIDIA Corporation, NVIDIA U is a conference developed to promote the advancement of graphics technology through industry and academic collaboration. NVIDIA U 2004 will be a highly focused, one day event. Conveniently held in Los Angeles one day before GP2 and two days prior to Siggraph 2004, it is sure to sizzle with presentations targeting current and future NVIDIA technology. NVIDIA U is an NDA only conference that provides the ideal forum for leaders in the graphics world to collaborate and share ideas and research in graphics technology. (NVIDIA U Information Page)

Given the increasing power and usage of commodity GPUs, many researchers are using them for general-purpose computation. The ACM Workshop on General-Purpose Computation on Graphics Processors (GP²), to be held the Saturday and Sunday before SIGGRAPH 2004 at one of the SIGGRAPH hotels, will explore current issues in general-purpose computing using graphics hardware. These issues include:

• Do GPUs have the potential of being a useful co-processor for a wide variety of applications?
  What are their algorithmic and architectural niches and can these be broadened?
• What are the major issues in terms of programmability, language and compiler support and software environments for GPUs?
• What are some of the future technology trends that can lead to more widespread use of GPUs?

This workshop will bring together leading researchers and practitioners from academia, research labs and industry working in computer graphics, scientific computation, high performance computing,
omputer architecture and related areas. The program will consist of invited talks, panels and poster presentations. (ACM GP² Workshop. Call for Posters.)

During the Advanced OpenGL Tutorial at the 2004 Game Developers Conference in San Jose, California, Mark Harris of NVIDIA will give a short talk on GPGPU for games. The OpenGL tutorial will be held Tuesday, March 23 from 10am until 6pm. Slides for this talk, “GPGPU : Beyond Graphics”, as well as other talks from the OpenGL Tutorial are available at this link.