Evaluating the acceleration of typical scientific problems on the GPU

  • Authors:
  • Dale Tristram;Karen Bradshaw

  • Affiliations:
  • Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa;Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the South African Institute for Computer Scientists and Information Technologists Conference
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

General-purpose computation on graphics processing units (GPGPU) has great potential to accelerate many scientific models and algorithms. However, some problems are considerably more difficult to accelerate than others, and it may be difficult for those new to GPGPU to ascertain the difficulty of accelerating a particular problem. Additionally, problems of different levels of difficulty require varying complexities of optimisations to achieve satisfactory results, and currently there is no clear separation between the different levels of known optimisations, which would be helpful to new users of GPGPU. Through what was learned in the acceleration of three problems, problem attributes have been identified to assist in evaluating the difficulty of accelerating a problem on a GPU. We envisage that with further development, these attributes could form the foundation of a difficulty classification system that could be used to determine whether GPU acceleration is practical for a candidate GPU acceleration problem, aid in identifying appropriate techniques and optimisations, and outline the required GPGPU knowledge.