Bill Dally of NVIDIA gave a wonderful keynote today at ISC 2013. He focused on addressing the challenges facing our market in getting to exascale computing. He talked about how Moore’s law is alive and well because transistors continue to double at an astonishing rate. However, the additional transistors are not translating into the same big performance gains as they did in the 1990’s. Whereas performance used to grow 50% per year, performance today is growing at a much slower pace. The biggest bottleneck to more performance is energy efficiency. Bill showed slides of chips and talked about the picojoules required to compute versus those required to move data and operands around the chip. The take home message was that …
Are You Getting Left Behind?
HPCwire posted a nice article today with trends from IDC on computer processing. These trends fall inline and corroborate things we’ve been saying here on this blog. Accelerators (including GPUs and co-processors) are taking off. Are you getting left behind? If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably at the bleeding edge, but nonetheless here are some interesting excerpts from HPCwire’s market report (go read the whole thing): “While they expected to see a jump in coprocessor and accelerator uptake, they were wholly unprepared for the overwhelming positive response to GPUs and new entrants into the market, most notably Intel’s shiny new Phi.” “Conway said that while accelerator and coprocessor adoption growth was anticipated, they had no idea that it would …
History of the Modern GPU Series
Graham Singer over at Techspot posted a series of articles a few weeks ago covering the history of the modern GPU. It is well-written and in-depth. For GPU affectionados, this is a nice read. There are 4 parts to the series: Part 1: (1976 – 1995) The Early Days of 3D Consumer Graphics Part 2: (1995 – 1999) 3Dfx Voodoo: The Game-changer Part 3: (2000 – 2006) The Nvidia vs. ATI Era Begins Part 4: (2006 – 2013) The Modern GPU: Stream processing units a.k.a. GPGPU Enjoy!
Parallel Software Development Trends for Dummies
Last month, I posted two articles describing computing trends and why heterogeneous computing will be a significant force in computing for the next decade. Today, I continue that series with an article describing the biggest challenge to continued increases in computing performance – parallel software development. Biggest Challenge As I described previously, in order to use an accelerator, software changes must be made. Regular x86-based compilers cannot compile code to run on accelerators without these needed changes. The amount of software change required varies depending upon the availability of and reliance upon software tools that increase performance and productivity. There are four possible approaches to take advantage of accelerators in heterogeneous computing environments: do-it-yourself, use compilers, use libraries, or use …
7 Highlights of GTC 2013 – Day 4 of 4
Day 4 at GTC is always a little less hyped than the first 3 days, but it is when some of the best sessions are found. Here are 7 of the highlights we’ve collected from our team on the last day of GTC 2013: Paulius Micikevicius of NVIDIA gave a great talk entitled, “Performance Optimization: Programming Guidelines and GPU Architecture Details Behind Them.” It was so great, we have 2 highlights from this talk. The first Paulius highlight is the information about how instruction level parallelism is essential to fully take advantage of Kepler GPUs. Paulius gave a clear presentation on these difficult concepts. The second Paulius highlight is the thorough treatment of memory hierarchy for Kepler. It is very detailed and …
7 Highlights of GTC 2013 – Day 3 of 4
Day 3 at GTC was awesome. It was super hard to narrow down our list to just 7 highlights. For instance, the stress ball pyramid in our booth does not count. Neither does the massive ArrayFire poster in front of the keynote hall. Here are 7 of the highlights we’ve collected from our team on the third day of GTC 2013: Professor Erez Lieberman Aiden of Baylor and Rice Universities gave a great keynote on “Parallel Processing of the Genomes, by the Genomes and for the Genomes.” He discussed how folding of genes and interactions between multiple folded genes can impact genetic expressions. It’s not just about the composition of the gene, but also how the gene folds. It turns …
7 Highlights of GTC 2013 – Day 2 of 4
Day 2 at GTC was high energy. The after parties are still thumping. It was a hive of GPU activity. Here are 7 of the highlights we’ve collected from our team on the second day of GTC 2013: Jen-Hsun Huang of NVIDIA gave an awesome keynote. He covered 5 topics: Computer graphics – Awesome life-like renderings of human faces (here and here) GPU computing update – 1.6 million CUDA downloads so far, tons of interesting GPU-accelerated applications (including matchmaking website fish.com, a diamond cutting company, Shazam, Cortexica, and others), roadmap update (see the next highlight) Tegra roadmap update – (see the 3rd highlight) Remote graphics update – using GPUs to render things remotely and pipe them to the monitors of …
7 Highlights of GTC 2013 – Day 1 of 4
AccelerEyes is out in force at GTC. We ended up with 10 of our engineers and sales staff here onsite. I collected feedback from the team to learn what people enjoyed the most from today’s activities. Here are 7 of the highlights we’ve collected from our team on the first day of GTC 2013: Will Ramey of NVIDIA kicked off GTC with a tutorial on the CUDA ecosystem. He talked about the three different approaches to getting GPU acceleration: 1) Libraries, 2) Compiler Directives, and 3) Programming Languages. He talked about how libraries, if you can find one for your application (hint, hint), are the best of the 3 options, because you get great performance and you don’t have to …
Heterogeneous Computing Trends for Dummies
Ten days ago, I posted an article on CPU Processing Trends for Dummies. Today, I continue that series with an article describing the latest major trend in computing, namely Heterogeneous Computing. The Point The point of these articles is to paint the high-level picture for trends in computer processing. I hope this bigger picture will help summarize things for those that do not breathe computer processors and technical software on a daily basis. Over the last 20 years, big gains in computer processing have been defined by increases in CPU clock speeds, then by increases in the number of CPU cores. The next 10+ years will be defined by heterogeneous computing. Heterogeneous Computing So let’s start with a definition: Heterogeneous …
CPU Processing Trends for Dummies
Over the years at AccelerEyes, it has been surprising to me how many people miss a big picture understanding of the trends affecting the computing industry. To help, I’m going to post a few articles with high-level explanations. I’m going to do so in a hand-wavy manner. I look forward in advance to the lively comments on my mistakes. But, in general, I think these posts will be a fairly accurate view of the important trends. Today, I’ll start by talking about CPU processing trends. Let’s start with something we all know: CPUs are central processing units and are the main processor in the computer. You probably had to label the CPU on a diagram at some point in grade school, …