Graduate Student Colloquium
Rafail Abramov
UIC
Graphic chips: a somewhat unexpected computational alternative
Abstract: Modern computer video cards nowadays are used primarily for real-time 3D
graphic applications, where fast 3D image rendering is a computationally
intensive problem, naturally suitable for parallel processing. As a
result, graphic processing units (GPU) eventually became powerful
multiprocessors, tailored for massively parallel floating point
computations with multiple (as much as 128) floating point arithmetic
units on a single chip. Recently, one of the video card manufacturers,
NVIDIA, started offering a common purpose software interface to program
a GPU for general parallel floating point computations, allowing to
obtain a speedup of 1-2 orders of magnitude in comparison with a modern
CPU for essentially same price. I will try to give an overview of this
new computational approach, as well as show a working program example
and compare the GPU performance with a similar CPU program.
Friday April 4, 2008 at 3:00 PM in SEO 636