GPU Programming
using BU Shared Computing Cluster
Scientific Computing and Visualization
Boston University
GPU Programming
• GPU – graphics processing unit
• Originally designed as a graphics processor
• Nvidia's GeForce 256 (1999) – first GPU
o single-chip processor for mathematically-intensive tasks
o transforms of vertices and polygons
o lighting
o polygon clipping
o texture mapping
o polygon rendering
GPU Programming
Modern GPUs are present in
Embedded systems
Personal Computers
Game consoles
Mobile Phones
Workstations
GPU Programming
Traditional GPU workflow
Vertex processing Blending, Z-buffering
Triangles, Lines,
Shading, Texturing
Points
GPU Programming
GPGPU
1999-2000 computer scientists from various fields started using
GPUs to accelerate a range of scientific applications.
GPU programming required the use of graphics APIs such as
OpenGL and Cg.
2002 James Fung (University of Toronto) developed OpenVIDIA.
NVIDIA greatly invested in GPGPU movement and offered a
number of options and libraries for a seamless experience for C, C+
+ and Fortran programmers.
GPU Programming
GPGPU timeline
In November 2006 Nvidia launched CUDA, an API that allows to
code algorithms for execution on Geforce GPUs using C
programming language.
Khronus Group defined OpenCL in 2008 supported on AMD,
Nvidia and ARM platforms.
In 2012 Nvidia presented and demonstrated OpenACC - a set of
directives that greatly simplify parallel programming of
heterogeneous systems.
GPU Programming
CPU GPU
CPUs consist of a few cores GPUs consist of hundreds or
optimized for serial processing thousands of smaller, efficient cores
designed for parallel performance
GPU Programming
SCC CPU SCC GPU
Intel Xeon X5650: NVIDIA Tesla M2070:
Clock speed: 2.66 GHz Core clock: 1.15GHz
4 instructions per cycle Single instruction
CPU - 6 cores 448 CUDA cores
2.66 x 4 x 6 = 1.15 x 1 x 448 =
63.84 Gigaflops double precision 515 Gigaflops double precision
GPU Programming
SCC CPU SCC GPU
Intel Xeon X5650: NVIDIA Tesla M2070:
Memory size: 288 GB Memory size: 3GB total
Bandwidth: 32 GB/sec Bandwidth: 150 GB/sec
GPU Programming
GPU Computing Growth
2008 2013
100M x 4.3 430M
CUDA-capable GPUs CUDA-capable GPUs
150K x 10.67 1.6M
CUDA downloads CUDA downloads
1 x 50 50
Supercomputer Supercomputers
4,000 x 9.25 37,000
Academic Papers
Academic Papers
GPU Programming
GPU Acceleration
Applications
GPU-accelerated OpenACC Programming
libraries Directives Languages
Seamless linking to GPU- Simple directives for easy Most powerful and flexible
enabled libraries. GPU-acceleration of new way to design GPU
and existing applications accelerated applications
cuFFT, cuBLAS,
C/C++, Fortran,
Thrust, NPP, IMSL, PGI Accelerator
Python, Java, etc.
CULA, cuRAND, etc.
GPU Programming
GPU Accelerated Libraries
powerful library of parallel algorithms and data
structures;
provides a flexible, high-level interface for GPU
programming;
For example, the thrust::sort algorithm delivers
5x to 100x faster sorting performance than STL
and TBB
GPU Programming
GPU Accelerated Libraries
a GPU-accelerated version of the complete
standard BLAS library;
cuBLAS
6x to 17x faster performance than the latest
MKL BLAS
Complete support for all 152 standard BLAS
routines
Single, double, complex, and double complex
data types
Fortran binding
GPU Programming
GPU Accelerated Libraries
cuSPARSE NPP cuFFT cuRAND
GPU Programming
OpenACC Directives
• Simple compiler directives
• Works on multicore CPUs & many core
GPUs
• Future integration into OpenMP
Program myscience
... serial code ... CPU
!$acc compiler Directive
do k = 1,n1
do i = 1,n2
... parallel code ... GPU
enddo
enddo
$acc end compiler Directive
End Program myscience
GPU Programming
CUDA
Programming language extension to C/C++ and FORTRAN;
Designed for efficient general purpose computation on GPU.
__global__ void kernel(float* x, float* y, float* z, int n){
int idx= blockIdx.x * blockDim.x + threadIdx.x;
if(idx < n) z[idx] = x[idx] * y[idx];
}
int main(){
...
cudaMalloc(...);
cudaMemcpy(...);
kernel <<<num_blocks, block_size>>> (...);
cudaMemcpy(...);
cudaFree(...);
...
}
GPU Programming
MATLAB with GPU-acceleration
Use GPUs with MATLAB through Parallel Computing Toolbox
• GPU-enabled MATLAB functions such as fft, filter, and several linear algebra
operations
• GPU-enabled functions in toolboxes: Communications System Toolbox, Neural
Network Toolbox, Phased Array Systems Toolbox and Signal Processing Toolbox
• CUDA kernel integration in MATLAB applications, using only a single line of MATLAB
code
A=rand(2^16,1); A=gpuArray(rand(2^16,1));
B=fft(A); B=fft(A);
GPU Programming
Will Execution on a GPU Accelerate My Application?
Computationally intensive—The time spent on computation significantly
exceeds the time spent on transferring data to and from GPU memory.
Massively parallel—The computations can be broken down into
hundreds or thousands of independent units of work.
