Slides are now available for the minisymposium “Scientific Computing on Emerging Many-Core architectures”, held in conjunction with the SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering 2009 (SIAM CSE’09, Miami, Florida). The minisymposium, organised by Mike Giles, Dominik Göddeke and Stefan Turek, focused on opportunities and challenges for scientific computing on novel many-core architectures, in particular IBM’s Cell processor and GPUs from NVIDIA, AMD and Intel. The talks covered a range of application areas, including the development of libraries and other tools to simplify the programming many-core processors. (Minisymposium: Scientific Computing on Emerging Many-Core architectures)

The new High-Performance Graphics Conference is the synthesis of two highly-successful conference series:

• Graphics Hardware, an annual conference focusing on graphics hardware, architecture, and systems since 1986, and
• Interactive Ray Tracing, an innovative conference series focusing on the emerging field of interactive ray tracing since 2006.

By combining these two conferences, High-Performance Graphics aims to bring to authors and attendees the best of both, while extending the scope of the new conference to cover the overarching field of performance-oriented graphics systems covering innovative algorithms, efficient implementations, and hardware architecture. This broader focus offers a common forum bringing together researchers, engineers, and architects to discuss the complex interactions of massively parallel hardware, novel programming models, efficient graphics algorithms, and innovative applications.

Paper submissions are due April 30th.  For more information see the High-Performance Graphics Website.

What do GPUs, FPGAs, vector processors and other special-purpose chips have in common? They are examples of advanced processor architectures that the scientific community is using to accelerate computationally demanding applications. While high-performance computing systems that use application accelerators are still rare, they will be the norm rather than the exception in the near future. The 2009 Symposium on Application Accelerators in High-Performance Computing aims to bring together developers of computing accelerators and end-users of the technology to exchange ideas and learn about the latest developments in the field. The Symposium will focus on the use of application accelerators in high-performance and scientific computing and issues that surround it. Topics of interest include:

• novel accelerator processors, systems, and architectures
• integration of accelerators with high-performance computing systems
• programming models for accelerator-based computing
• languages and compilers for accelerator-based computing
• run-time environments, profiling and debugging tools for accelerator-based computing
• scientific and engineering applications that use application accelerators

Presentations from technology developers and the academic user community are invited. Researchers interested in presenting at the Symposium should submit extended abstracts of 2-3 pages to submit@saahpc.org by April 20, 2009. All submissions will be reviewed by the Technical Program Committee and accepted submissions will be presented as either oral presentations or posters. Presentation materials will be made available online at www.saahpc.org.
(2009 Symposium on Application Accelerators in High Performance Computing (SAAHPC’09). July 27-31, 2009, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL)

The complete course notes from the “Parallel Computing for Graphics: Beyond Programmable Shading” SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 course , are available online. The course gives an introduction to parallel programming architectures and environments for interactive graphics and explores case studies of combining traditional rendering API usage with advanced parallel computation from game developers, researchers, and graphics hardware vendors. There are strong indications that the future of interactive graphics involves a programming model more flexible than today’s OpenGL and Direct3D pipelines. As such, graphics developers need a basic understanding of how to combine emerging parallel programming techniques with the traditional interactive rendering pipeline. This course gives an introduction to several parallel graphics architectures and programming environments, and introduces the new types of graphics algorithms that will be possible. The case studies in the class discuss the mix of parallel programming constructs used, details of the graphics algorithms, and how the rendering pipeline and computation interact to achieve the technical goals. The course speakers are Jason Yang and Justin Hensley (AMD), Tim Foley (Intel), Mark Harris (NVIDIA), Kun Zhou (Zhejiang University), Anjul Patney (UC Davis), Pedro Sander (HKUIST), and Christopher Oat (AMD) (Complete course notes.)

The complete course notes from the “Beyond Programmable Shading” SIGGRAPH 2008 course , are available online. The course gives an introduction to parallel programming architectures and environments for interactive graphics and explores case studies of combining traditional rendering API usage with advanced parallel computation from game developers, researchers, and graphics hardware vendors. There are strong indications that the future of interactive graphics involves a programming model more flexible than today’s OpenGL and Direct3D pipelines. As such, graphics developers need a basic understanding of how to combine emerging parallel programming techniques with the traditional interactive rendering pipeline. This course gives an introduction to several parallel graphics architectures and programming environments, and introduces the new types of graphics algorithms that will be possible. The case studies in the class discuss the mix of parallel programming constructs used, details of the graphics algorithms, and how the rendering pipeline and computation interact to achieve the technical goals. The course organizers are Aaron Lefohn (Intel) and Mike Houston (AMD). Additional course speakers include Kayvon Fatahalian (Stanford), David Luebke (NVIDIA), Tom Forsyth (Intel), John Owens (UC Davis), Chas Boyd (Microsoft), Aaftab Munshi (Apple), Fabio Pellacini (Dartmouth), Jon Olick (Id Software), Matt Pharr (Intel), and Jeremy Shopf (AMD). (Complete course notes)

Date: Monday November 17th 2008 – 5:30pm to 6:30pmLocation: Rio Grande Mexican Restaurant – right across the street from SC08

OpenCL is a royalty-free, open standard being created by the Khronos Group for programming heterogeneous parallel computing across GPUs and CPUs. OpenCL is being driven by industry-leading companies including AMD, Apple, ARM, Codeplay, Ericsson, Freescale, Imagination Technologies, IBM, Intel, Nokia, NVIDIA, Motorola, RapidMind and Texas Instruments. OpenCL enables portable programming of the emerging intersection of GPU and multi-core CPU compute capability and is designed to support a wide range of applications, from consumer software all the way to HPC solutions, through a low-level, high-performance, device-independent abstraction. This informal gathering will provide one of the first opportunities for the HPC community to gain an insight into the architecture and direction of this exciting development. Tex-Mex appetizers and cold beer will be provided! Please register early as seating is limited – we look forward to seeing you in Austin!

(OpenCL Briefing Registration at khronos.org)

The 2nd workshop on General-Purpose Computation on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU-2) will be held March 8, 2009 in Washington, D.C., in conjunction with ASPLOS’09. The workshop provides a forum to discuss advances in both hardware and software associated with this new high performance computing environment. Paper Submissions are due December 12, 2008. Accepted papers will appear in a published proceedings. (Workshop information page)

In addition to the papers already announced, Dr. Simon Harding (Memorial University, Newfoundland) and Dr. Tien-Tsin Wong (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) will lead a discussion on the practicalities of running evolution on modern graphics cards. They will contrast the current leading GPGPU tools considering ease of use, and support for debugging and performance monitoring. CIGPU will close with a short session considering the future of computational intelligence on GPUs.

Slides from the 2007 AstroGPU conference, held at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton last November, have been posted to the AstroGPU Website.