[Beowulf] gpgpu

Li, Bo libo at buaa.edu.cn
Tue Aug 26 17:50:11 PDT 2008


Hello,
IMHO, it is better to call the BLAS or similiar libarary rather than programing you own functions. And CUDA treats the GPU as a cluster, so .CU is not working as our normal codes. If you have got to many matrix or vector computation, it is better to use Brook+/CAL, which can show great power of AMD gpu. 
Regards,
Li, Bo
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mikhail Kuzminsky" <kus at free.net>
To: "Vincent Diepeveen" <diep at xs4all.nl>
Cc: "Beowulf" <beowulf at beowulf.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 27, 2008 2:35 AM
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] gpgpu


> In message from Vincent Diepeveen <diep at xs4all.nl> (Tue, 26 Aug 2008 
> 00:30:30 +0200):
>>Hi Mikhail,
>>
>>I'd say they're ok for black box 32 bits calculations that can do with 
>>a GB or 2 RAM,
>>other than that they're just luxurious electric heating.
> 
> I also want to have simple blackbox, but 64-bit (Tesla C1060 or 
> Firestream 9170 or 9250). Unfortunately the life isn't restricted to 
> BLAS/LAPACK/FFT :-) 
> 
> So I'll need to program something other. People say that the best 
> choice is CUDA for Nvidia. When I look to sgemm source, it has about 1 
> thousand (or higher) strings in *.cu files. Thereofore I think that a 
> bit more difficult alghorithm  as some special matrix diagonalization 
> will require a lot of programming work :-(.
> 
> It's interesting, that when I read Firestream Brook+ "kernel function" 
> source example - for addition of 2 vectors ("Building a High Level 
> Language Compiler For GPGPU",
> Bixia Zheng (bixia.zheng at amd.com)
> Derek Gladding (dereked.gladding at amd.com)
> Micah Villmow (micah.villmow at amd.com)
> June 8th, 2008)
> 
> - it looks SIMPLE. May be there are a lot of details/source lines 
> which were omitted from this example ?
> 
> 
>>Vincent
>>p.s. if you ask me, honestely, 250 watt or so for latest gpu is really 
>>too much.
> 
> 250 W is TDP, the average value declared is about 160 W. I don't 
> remember, which GPU - from AMD or Nvidia - has a lot of special 
> functional units for sin/cos/exp/etc. If they are not used, may be the 
> power will a bit more lower.
> 
> What is about Firestream 9250, AMD says about 150 W (although I'm not 
> absolutely sure that it's TDP) - it's as for some 
> Intel Xeon quad-cores chips w/names beginning from X.
> 
> Mikhail
> 
> 
>>On Aug 23, 2008, at 10:31 PM, Mikhail Kuzminsky wrote:
>>
>>> BTW, why GPGPUs are considered as vector systems ?
>>> Taking into account that GPGPUs contain many (equal) execution 
>>>units,
>>> I think it might be not SIMD, but SPMD model. Or it depends from  
>>> the software tools used (CUDA etc) ?
>>>
>>> Mikhail Kuzminsky
>>> Computer Assistance to Chemical Research Center
>>> Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry
>>> Moscow
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org
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>>
> 
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