SHF: Small: Software Fundamentals for Manycore Systems

University Of California-Davis, Davis CA

Investigators

Abstract

The modern computer has two processors, the "central processing unit"(CPU) and the "graphics processing unit" (GPU). Historically, the CPU has been used for general-purpose computing and the GPU for graphics, but as GPUs have become more flexible and programmable, they are increasingly used for computationally-intense general-purpose tasks. However, programming a GPU is difficult, because GPU programmers must divide their programs into many parallel parts. What makes this process easier is using common parallel building blocks developed by expert programmers. The research group, together with colleagues from NVIDIA, is building a library of these parallel primitives. In this work, the PIs are concentrating on three major tasks: the addition of new primitives to this library; techniques for optimizing the primitives that we are including; and an extension of the library to supporting many GPUs in a system.