The CPU has traditionally been the computational work horse in scientific computing, but we have seen a tremendous increase in the use of accelerators, such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), in the last decade. These architectures are used because they consume less power and offer higher performance than equivalent CPU solutions. They are typically also far less expensive, as more CPUs, and even clusters, are required to match their performance. Even though these accelerators are powerful in terms of floating point operations per second, they are considerably more primitive in terms of capabilities. For example, they cannot even open a file on disk without the use of the CPU. Thus, most applications can benefit from using accelerators to perform heavy computation, whilst running complex tasks on the CPU. This use of different compute resources is often referred to as heterogeneous computing, and we explore the use of heterogeneous architectures for scientific computing in this thesis. Through six papers, we present qualitative and quantitative comparisons of different heterogeneous architectures, the use of GPUs to accelerate linear algebra operations in MATLAB, and efficient shallow water simulation on GPUs. Our results show that the use of heterogeneous architectures can give large performance gains.

(André R. Brodtkorb, “Scientific Computing on Heterogeneous Architectures”, Ph.D. thesis, University of Oslo, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, 2010, (PDF))

The main contribution of this thesis is to demonstrate that graphics processors (GPUs) as representatives of emerging many-core architectures are very well-suited for the fast and accurate solution of large sparse linear systems of equations, using parallel multigrid methods on heterogeneous compute clusters. Such systems arise for instance in the discretisation of (elliptic) partial differential equations with finite elements. We report on at least one order of magnitude speedup over highly-tuned conventional CPU implementations, without sacrificing either accuracy m
or functionality. In more detail, this thesis includes the following contributions:

Single precision floating point computations may be insufficient for the class of problems considered in this thesis. We revisit mixed precision iterative refinement techniques to not only increase the accuracy of computed results, but also to increase the efficiency of the solution process. Both on CPUs and on GPUs, we demonstrate a significant performance improvement without loss of accuracy compared to computing in high precision only.

We present efficient parallelisation techniques for multigrid solvers on graphics hardware, in particular for numerically strong smoothers and preconditioners that are suitable for highly anisotropic grids and operators. For instance, an efficient formulation of the cyclic reduction algorithm to solve tridiagonal systems is developed. In view of hardware-oriented numerics, we carefully analyse the trade-off between numerical and runtime performance for inexact parallelisation techniques that decouple some of the inherently sequential characteristics of strong smoothing operators.

For large-scale established software frameworks, the re-implementation tailored to novel hardware platforms is often prohibitively expensive. We develop a ‘minimally invasive’ approach to integrate support for co-processor hardware like GPUs into FEAST, a finite element discretisation and solver toolbox. Our technique has the major advantage that applications built on top of the toolbox do not have to be changed at all to benefit from co-processor acceleration. The approach is evaluated for benchmark problems in linearised elasticity and stationary laminar flow computed on large-scale GPU-enhanced clusters. Good speedup factors and near-ideal weak scalability are observed. The achievable speedup is analysed and a theoretical speedup model is presented.

Finally, we provide a historical overview of scientific computing on graphics hardware since the early beginnings in 2001/2002, when GPGPU was an obscure research topic pursued by few, to the widespread adoption nowadays. We discuss the evolution of the hardware and the programming model, and provide a comprehensive bibliography of publications related to PDE simulations on GPUs.

(Dominik Göddeke: “Fast and Accurate Finite-Element Multigrid Solvers for PDE Simulations on GPU Clusters”. PhD thesis, Technische Universität Dortmund, Fakultät für Mathematik, May 2010. Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/2003/27243)

(Efficient Ant Colony Optimization Algorithms for Structure- and Ligand-Based Drug Design.  Oliver Korb, PhD thesis, University of Konstanz, 2008)

Big improvements in the performance of graphics processing units (GPUs) turned them into a compelling platform for high performance computing. In this thesis, we discuss the usage of NVIDIA’s CUDA in two applications — Einstein@Home, a distributed computing software, and OpenSteer, a game-like application. Our work on Einstein@Home demonstrates that CUDA can be integrated into existing applications with minimal changes, even in programs designed without considering GPU usage. However the existing data structure of Einstein@Home performs poorly when used on the GPU. We demonstrate that using a redesigned data structure improves the performance to about three times as fast as the original CPU version, even though the code executed on the device is not optimized. We further discuss the design of a novel spatial data structure called “dynamic grid” that is optimized for CUDA usage. We measure its performance by integrating it into the Boids scenario of OpenSteer. Our new concept outperforms a uniform grid by a margin of up to 15%, even though the dynamic grid still provides optimization potential.

(Case studies on gpu usage and data structure design. J. Breitbart, Master’s thesis, Universität Kassel, 2008)