FGC 2011 – The Second International Workshop on Frontier of GPU Computing, is held in conjunction with CSE 2011, Dalian, China, 24 – 26 August, 2011. More information can be found at http://www.comp.hkbu.edu.hk/~chxw/fgc2011/index.php.

The First International Workshop on Characterizing Applications for Heterogeneous Exascale Systems (co-located with ICS, June 4, 2011) is intended to provide evaluations of the characteristics of computational kernels and applications, and how different software stacks impact them, to guide future accelerator-based HPC system designs.

We solicit papers on all aspects of HPC application studies, especially those that involve accelerators such as GPUs, FPGAs, etc. The topics include (but are not limited to):

• Categorizing/characterizing of HPC applications and kernels with respect to patterns in computation structure, communication, cache accesses, memory, I/O, and file accesses.
• Evaluating the importance of individual kernels within an entire application.
• Modeling for applications running on accelerator-based heterogeneous HPC systems.
• Implication of workload characterization in heterogeneous design issues.
• Benchmarking of applications, kernels or software stacks and tools supporting applications.

The call for papers and more details about the workshop may be found on the website.

Submissions are cordially invited for the Workshop on GPU Computing, held with PPAM 2011 — 9th International Conference on Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics, September 11-14, 2011, Torun, Poland. This workshop is organised by Josep R. Herrero, Enrique S. Quintana-Orti, and Robert Strzodka.

GPU programming is now a much richer environment that it used to be a few years ago. On top of the two major programming languages, CUDA and OpenCL, libraries (e.g., cufft) and high level interfaces (e.g., thrust) have been developed that allow a fast access to the computing power of GPUs without detailed knowledge or programming of GPU hardware.

Annotation-based programming models (e.g., PGI Accelerator), GPU plug-ins for existing mathematical software (e.g., Jacket in Matlab), GPU script languages (e.g., PyOpenCL), and new data parallel languages (e.g., Copperhead) bring GPU programming to a new level. Read the rest of this entry »

The Pan-American Advanced Studies Institute (PASI)—”Scientific Computing in the Americas: the challenge of massive parallelism”—was held in Valparaiso, Chile on 3–14 January 2011. The event hosted 14 lecturers and 68 participants, thanks to NSF/DOE funding. Lecture materials are now available publicly: PDFs of the lecture slides on the PASI website, and screencasts (video) via an iTunes U course and on YouTube also).

The Parallel Processing for Imaging Applications conference, part of IS&T/SPIE’s Electronic Imaging conference, was held on January 24–25 in San Francisco. The conference had a large number of GPU papers (SPIE digital library link):

• Using a commercial graphical processing unit and the CUDA programming language to accelerate scientific image processing applications by Broussard and Ives
• GPGPU real-time texture analysis framework by Akhloufi et al.
• A parallel implementation of 3D Zernike moment analysis by Berjón et al.
• Visualization assisted by parallel processing by Lange et al.
• GPU color space conversion by Chase and Vondran
• Acceleration of the Retinex algorithm for image restoration by GPGPU/CUDA by Wang and Huang
• Video transcoding using GPU accelerated decoder by Hsu
• Real-time image deconvolution on the GPU by Klosowski and Krishnan
• GPU-completeness: theory and implications by Lin
• A parallel error diffusion implementation on a GPU by Zhang et al.
• Evaluation of CPU and GPU architectures for spectral image analysis algorithms by Fresse et al.
• Real-time 3D flash ladar imaging through GPU data processing by Wong et al.
• Advanced MRI reconstruction toolbox with accelerating on GPU by Wu et al.
• Accelerating image recognition on mobile devices using GPGPU by López et al.
• A GPU accelerated PDF transparency engine by Recker et al.

Almost all the presentations from the recent UK GPU Computing Conference held on December 13-14 2010 in Cambridge  are now available at http://www.many-core.group.cam.ac.uk/ukgpucc2/programme.shtml. Over 100 delegates saw a varied mix of talks from both industry and academia over the 2 day meeting.

The “GPUs in Databases” workshop is devoted to sharing the knowledge related to applying GPUs in database environments and to discuss possible future development of this application domain. The workshop topics include, but are not limited to:

• GPU based data compression (lossless/lossy compression and decompression, real time compression and decompression of multimedia)
• GPUs in databases and data warehouses (join processing, data indexing, data aggregation, bulk query processing, analytical query processing)
• Data mining using GPUs (classification, frequent itemsets and association rules, frequent subgraphs, sequential patterns, clustering, social networks mining, regression)
• GPUs in streaming databases (query processing in streaming databases, stream compression/decompression)
• Applications of GPUs in bioinformatics

The workshop will take place on September 19th, 2011 and is co-located with ADBIS 2011 in Vienna, Austria. Submissions are due April 5th, 2011. All of accepted submissions will be published in CEUR workshop proceedings and the best papers will also be published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science and Foundations of Computing and Decision Sciences.

More detailed information can be found at the workshop website http://gid2011.cs.put.poznan.pl.

From a recent announcement:

Calling all software development innovators in general purpose GPU (GPGPU), data parallel and heterogeneous computing. On June 13-16, 2011 AMD will host the AMD Fusion Developer Summit (AFDS) in Bellevue, Washington. The AFDS conference board has issued a call for presentation proposals, inviting creators of next-generation software to share research and development work through presentations based on the latest technical papers or reports.

AFDS will be a great venue for developers, academics and innovative entrepreneurs to network with others engaged in related work, collectively defining the future course of heterogeneous computing. And delivering a presentation offers you the perfect opportunity to advocate programming paradigms or gain support for industry standards.

The submission deadline is Feb. 4 2011, and the full call is available at http://amd-member.com/newsletters/DevCentral/1012.html.

The ASIM (Arbeitsgruppe Simulation) and the TUM are jointly organizing the ASIM Workshop 2011 at Technische Universität München (TUM) and the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Germany. The workshop theme is “Trends in Computational Science and Engineering: Foundations of Modeling and Simulation” and will take place March 14 to March 16, 2011. The conference program consists of two building blocks: contributed talks and an extensive poster session for new and upcoming Ph.D. students. Poster submissions are cordially invited; registration closes February 12, 2011. More information is available at http://www5.in.tum.de/asim2011.html.

Next year’s spring meeting of the German Physical Society (DPG) in Dresden, Germany, includes a focus session “GPU Computing”. This session is jointly organized by the divisions “Physics of Socio-Economic Systems (SOE)” and “Statistical Physics and Dynamics (DY)”. Therefore, a large audience is guaranteed. Although this is the annual meeting of the German Physical Society, it has become an international meeting where almost all of the talks are presented in English. It is a large and diverse meeting with about 7000 participants altogether. The meeting takes place from March 14-18, 2011. Abstracts for contributions are cordially invited and should be submitted online by Wednesday, Dec. 1st.