All issues

The history of the development of CUDA technology and its fundamental limitations are discribed. The article is intended for those readers who are not familiar with graphics adapter programming features but want to evaluate the possibilities for GPU computing applications.

In this article the experience of reading “CUDA and OpenCL programming” course during high perfomance computing summer school MIPT-2010 is analyzed. Content of lectures and practical tasks, as well as manner of presenting of the material are regarded. Performance issues of different algorithms implemented by students at practical training session are dicussed.

A hybrid cluster implies the use of computational devices with radically different architectures. Usually, these are conventional CPU architecture (e.g. x86_64) and GPU architecture (e. g. NVIDIA CUDA). Creating and exploiting such a cluster requires some experience: in order to harness all computational power of the described system and get substantial speedup for computational tasks many factors should be taken into account. These factors consist of hardware characteristics (e.g. network infrastructure, a type of data storage, GPU architecture) as well as software stack (e.g. MPI implementation, GPGPU libraries). So, in order to run scientific applications GPU capabilities, software features, task size and other factors should be considered.

This report discusses opportunities and problems of hybrid computations. Some statistics from tests programs and applications runs will be demonstrated. The main focus of interest is open source applications (e. g. OpenFOAM) that support GPGPU (with some parts rewritten to use GPGPU directly or by replacing libraries).

There are several approaches to organize heterogeneous computations for different GPU architectures out of which CUDA library and OpenCL framework are compared. CUDA library is becoming quite typical for hybrid systems with NVIDIA cards, but OpenCL offers portability opportunities which can be a determinant factor when choosing framework for development. We also put emphasis on multi-GPU systems that are often used to build hybrid clusters. Calculations were performed on a hybrid cluster of SPbU computing center.

Modeling of carbon nanostructures by means of classical molecular dynamics requires a lot of computations. One of the ways to improve the performance of basic algorithms is to transform them for running on SIMD-type computing systems such as systems with dedicated GPU. In this work we describe the development of algorithms for computation of many-body interaction based on Tersoff and embedded-atom potentials by means of OpenCL technology. OpenCL standard provides universality and portability of the algorithms and can be successfully used for development of the software for heterogeneous computing systems. The performance of algorithms is evaluated on CPU and GPU hardware platforms. It is shown that concurrent memory writes is effective for Tersoff bond order potential. The same approach for embedded-atom potential is shown to be slower than algorithm without concurrent memory access. Performance evaluation shows a significant GPU acceleration of energy-force evaluation algorithms for many-body potentials in comparison to the corresponding serial implementations.