What is going with this GPU stuff?
There is a lot of buzz in the industry today about the use of graphic cards for general computing, a.k.a. GP-GPU. Essentially, as clock speeds for CPUs have slowed down, we have all been scrambling to go parallel. CPU vendors have introduced dual-core, quad-core and more to increase performance, introducing what we at Rogue Wave termed the Multi-core Dilemma.
In addition, many people have been looking at specialty hardware for additional threads. One of the most interesting ones that has gained a lot of attention lately is the graphical processing unit (GPU). These have been used for years as graphics accelerators for video games and other media.
Recently people have been using them for general purpose computing since they are so good at crunching numbers (after all, rendering graphics is all about advanced math). This led to the term GP-GPU (general purpose graphical processing unit). It also happens that this hardware is very parallel. A typical consumer grade graphics card has about 128 threads. That’s a lot of calculations in a small space - no wonder they are so attractive. And for certain applications, it’s not uncommon to see anywhere from 10 to 30x throughput increase over a dual core CPU.
However, the software development environment for GPUs has several problems:
1. GPU hardware is difficult to program. This is improved from a few years ago, but it’s still much more difficult than a typical CPU environment and lacks the robust tools we’re all used to.
2. APIs for this hardware are proprietary to the vendor hardware. This is something we hear on a regular basis as an inhibitor to adopting GP-GPU.
And new development isn’t the only thing - probably more important right now is how to make existing code run here without rewriting everything.
All of this gets to the heart of parallel computing in general. The progress of software development in general depends on our ability to do parallel computing, and do it well. GP-GPU programming is a window into the world of challenges - and opportunities - that lay ahead.
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