Click on image to enlargeGPGPU as the name suggests is termed "General Purpose computation on Graphics Processing Units". This is a technique of using a GPU, which is usually used for rendering computer graphics to perform computations of extreme orders which are traditionally handled by a CPU.
To this date, CPUs are known to have a maximum of 12-cores (AMD Opteron 6000 series and Intel Xeon processors) whereas graphics cards these days come with approximately 240+ cores. So you can imagine why there is a growing necessity to use a GPU for computational purposes.
By using a GPU, a normal person can turn his/her Personal Computer into a Personal "Super" Computer.
Fig. 1. A pictorial represtation of the architecture difference between an Intel Penryn processor and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 Graphics card GPU
GPGPU aims at the application developer modifying the application to take the compute-intensive kernels and map them to the GPU. The rest of the work is handled by the CPU. To perform mapping the developer has to rewrite the functions to expose the parallel-ism in them i.e. The developer has to re-write the code to use parallel computing.
NVIDIA uses it's very famous CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) to infuse it's GPUs with the extraordinary compute power.
Some features of the NVIDIA Tesla series GPU Computing processors are :
| GPUs powered by the Fermi-generation of the CUDA architecture | Delivers cluster performance at 1/10th the cost and 1/20th the power of CPU-only systems based on the latest quad core CPUs. |
| 448 CUDA Cores | Delivers up to 515 Gigaflops of double-precision peak performance in each GPU, enabling a single workstation to deliver a Teraflop or more of performance. Single precision peak performance is over a Teraflop per GPU. |
| ECC Memory | Meets a critical requirement for computing accuracy and reliability for workstations. Offers protection of data in memory to enhance data integrity and reliability for applications. Register files, L1/L2 caches, shared memory, and DRAM all are ECC protected. |
| Desktop Cluster Performance | Solves large-scale problems faster than a small server cluster on a single workstation with multiple GPUs. |
| Up to 6GB of GDDR5 memory per GPU | Maximizes performance and reduces data transfers by keeping larger data sets in local memory that is attached directly to the GPU. |
| NVIDIA Parallel DataCache™ | Accelerates algorithms such as physics solvers, ray-tracing, and sparse matrix multiplication where data addresses are not known beforehand. This includes a configurable L1 cache per Streaming Multiprocessor block and a unified L2 cache for all of the processor cores. |
| NVIDIA GigaThread™ Engine | Maximizes the throughput by faster context switching that is 10X faster than previous architecture, concurrent kernel execution, and improved thread block scheduling. |
| Asynchronous Transfer | Turbocharges system performance by transferring data over the PCIe bus while the computing cores are crunching other data. Even applications with heavy data-transfer requirements, such as seismic processing, can maximize the computing efficiency by transferring data to local memory before it is needed. |
| CUDA programming environment with broad support of programming languages and APIs | Choose C, C++, OpenCL, DirectCompute, or Fortran to express application parallelism and take advantage of the “Fermi” GPU’s innovative architecture. NVIDIA Parallel Nsight™ tool is available for Microsoft Visual Studio developers. |
| High Speed , PCIe Gen 2.0 Data Transfer | Maximizes bandwidth between the host system and the Tesla processors. Enables Tesla systems to work with virtually any PCIe-compliant host system with an open PCIe x16 slot. |
Click on image to enlargeFig. 2. A pictorial representation of the difference in performance between a CPU and a GPU over the years.
Applications:
Applications of GPU computing are many including MATLAB acceleration, physical based simulation and physics engines, Tone mapping, Audio Signal processing, Computational Finance, Data Mining, Analytics and Databases, Molecular Dynamics, et cetera.
References:
NVIDIA Published PDF (Must Read) : PDF Link
I hope this post wasn't too mind-boggling. Queries and Comments are always welcome.
