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Lecture 2

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9 views

Lecture 2

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nadiabha
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We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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CSC 391/691: GPU Programming Fall 2011

Introduction to GPUs for HPC

Copyright © 2011 Samuel S. Cho


High Performance Computing

• Speed: Many problems that are


interesting to scientists and engineers
would take a long time to execute on
a PC or laptop: months, years, “never”.

• Size: Many problems that are


interesting to scientists and engineers
can’t fit on a PC or laptop with a few
GB of RAM or a few 100s of GB of
disk space.

• Supercomputers or clusters of
computers can make these problems
practically numerically solvable.
Scientific and Engineering Problems
• Simulations of physical phenomena such as:
• Weather forecasting
• Earthquake forecasting
• Galaxy formation
• Oil reservoir management
• Molecular dynamics

• Data Mining: Finding needles of critical


information in a haystack of data such as:
• Bioinformatics
• Signal processing
• Detecting storms that might turn into
hurricanes

• Visualization: turning a vast sea of data into


pictures that scientists can understand.

• At its most basic level, all of these problems


involve many, many floating point
operations.
Hardware Accelerators

• In HPC, an accelerator is hardware


component whose role is to speed up
some aspect of the computing
workload.

• In the olden days (1980s), Not an accelerator*


supercomputers sometimes had array
processors, which did vector
operations on arrays

• PCs sometimes had floating point


accelerators: little chips that did the
floating point calculations in hardware
rather than software.

Not an accelerator*

*Okay, I lied.
To Accelerate Or Not To Accelerate

• Pro:
• They make your code
run faster.
• Cons:
• They’re expensive.
• They’re hard to program.
• Your code may not be
cross-platform.
Why GPU for HPC?

• Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) were


originally designed to accelerate graphics tasks
like image rendering.

• They became very very popular with video


gamers, because they’ve produced better and
better images, and lightning fast.

• And, prices have been extremely good, ranging


from three figures at the low end to four figures
at the high end.

• Chips are expensive to design (hundreds of


millions of $$$), expensive to build the factory
for (billions of $$$), but cheap to produce.

• For example, in 2006 – 2007, GPUs sold at a


rate of about 80 million cards per year,
generating about $20 billion per year in revenue.

• This means that the GPU companies have been


able to recoup the huge fixed costs.

• Remember: GPUs mostly do stuff like rendering


images. This is done through mostly floating
point arithmetic – the same stuff people use
supercomputing for!
What are GPUs?

• GPUs have developed from graphics cards into a


platform for high performance computing (HPC)
-- perhaps the most important development in Early design
HPC for many years.

• Co-processors -- very old idea that appeared in Memory CPU


1970s and 1980s with floating point co-
processors attached to microprocessors that
did not then have floating point capability.

• These coprocessors simply executed floating Graphics


point instructions that were fetched from card
memory.

• Around same time, interest to provide hardware


support for displays, especially with increasing
use of graphics and PC games. Display
• Led to graphics processing units (GPUs)
attached to CPU to create video display.
Modern GPU Design

• By late 1990’s, graphics chips needed Input stage


to support 3-D graphics, especially
for games and graphics APIs such as
DirectX and OpenGL. Vertex shader
stage

• Graphics chips generally had a Graphics


pipeline structure with individual memory
Geometry
stages performing specialized shader stage
operations, finally leading to loading
frame buffer for display.
Rasterizer stage

• Individual stages may have access to Frame


buffer
graphics memory for storing Pixel shading
intermediate computed data. stage
General Purpose GPU (GPGPU) Designs

• High performance pipelines call for high-speed (IEEE) floating point operations.

• Known as GPGPU (General-purpose computing on graphics processing units) -- Difficult


to do with specialized graphics pipelines, but possible.)

• By mid 2000’s, recognized that individual stages of graphics pipeline could be implemented
by a more general purpose processor core (although with a data-parallel paradigm)

• 2006 -- First GPU for general high performance computing as well as graphics processing,
NVIDIA GT 80 chip/GeForce 8800 card.

• Unified processors that could perform vertex, geometry, pixel, and general
computing operations

• Could now write programs in C rather than graphics APIs.

• Single-instruction multiple thread (SIMT) programming model


NVIDIA Tesla Platform

• NVIDIA Tesla series was their first platform for the high performance
computing market.

• Named for Nikola Tesla, a pioneering mechanical and electrical engineer and
inventor.

GTX 480 C2070


NVIDIA GTX 480 Specs

• 3 billion transistors

• 480 compute cores

• 1.401 GHz

• Single precision floating point performance:


1.35 TFLOPs (2 single precision flops per clock
per core)

• Double precision floating point performance:


168 GFLOPs (1 double precision flop per clock
per core)

• Internal RAM: 1.5 GB DDR5 VRAM

• Internal RAM speed: 177.4 GB/sec (compared


21-25 GB/sec for regular RAM)

• PCIe slot (at most 8 GB/sec per GPU card)

• 250 W thermal power


Coming: Kepler and Maxwell

• NVIDIA’s 20-series is also known by the codename “Fermi.” It runs at about


0.5 TFLOPs per GPU card (peak).

• The next generation, to be released in 2011, is codenamed “Kepler” and will


be capable of something like 1.4 TFLOPs double precision per GPU card.

• After “Kepler” will come “Maxwell” in 2013, capable of something like 4


TFLOPs double precision per GPU card.

• So, the increase in performance is likely to be roughly 2.5x – 3x per


generation, roughly every two years.
Maryland CPU/GPU Cluster Infrastructure

http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/
research/GPU/facilities.html
Intel’s Response to NVIDIA GPUs
Does it work?

Example Applications URL Speedup


Seismic Database http://www.headwave.com 66x – 100x
Mobile Phone Antenna Simulation http://www.accelware.com 45x
Molecular Dynamics http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd 21x – 100x
Neuron Simulation http://www.evolvedmachines.com 100x
MRI Processing http://bic-test.beckman.uiuc.edu 245x – 415x
Atmospheric Cloud Simulation http://www.cs.clemson.edu/~jesteel/clouds.html 50x

• Looks like remarkable speedup compared


to traditional CPU-based HPC approaches

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