High-performance Computing using Graphics Processors

Dr. Rekesh Mohan gave a very interesting seminar in our Institute recently. It was about the use of existing hardware used for graphics applications for high performance computing. 

An important recent trend in high-performance computing is the use of hardware originally designed for graphics and games to solve general purpose computing problems. Modern Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) deliver enormous power for arithmetically-intensive computations, at extremely low cost and power consumption as compared to CPU based computing clusters. 

The existing programs need to be modified using the syntax that can be understood by the Graphics Processing units. This requires certain libraries and commands. The speed could be enhanced to 10-100 times, and is cost effective compared to parallel CPU cluster method. 

Check here for two platforms to use for GPU programming:- 

GPGPU General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit 

CUDA Compute Unified Device Architecture