Pixels to PetaFLOPS: How GPUs are Pushing the HPC Envelope
The combined challenges of multi-core CPUs in HPC combined with with a pronounced lack in recent clock speed increases have led many users on a quest for alternative commodity hardware that can be used to increase performance. Enter the modern day Graphics Processing Unit (GPU).
Everyone knows the clock speed increases in commodity CPUs have slowed down to a crawl. There are several reasons for this, but the bottom line is that we aren’t likely to see increasing performance with each new processor as we have in the past. At the same time Moore’s Law is still holding, so the number of transistors per processor is increasing. CPU companies have taken the extra transistors and used them to create extra cores and cache, leading us into the multi-core era of computing. Cores are great, but there are some challenges facing many programmers as they convert to multi-core systems.
First, some applications are driven by single core performance. They can run over multiple cores using threads, OpenMP, or MPI, but in the end the overall code performance is driven by the single limiting process on a single core. Second, the performance of the memory and I/O buses are not increasing as rapidly as the number of cores is increasing. This situation means that the amount of memory bandwidth per core is decreasing, reducing performance. Also, the number of cores per network interface (NIC) is rapidly increasing, possibly reducing the performance, or at the very least requiring high performance networks.
The challenges with multi-core CPUs in HPC can be overcome to a certain degree, but people are still looking for more performance from their systems. This quest has led people to look around for other commodity hardware that can be used to increase performance. Enter the…
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