Tag: GPU

GPGPU for Instruction-Set Simulation – Maybe, Maybe not

I just read a quite interesting article by Christian Pinto et al, “GPGPU-Accelerated Parallel and Fast Simulation of Thousand-core Platforms“, published at the CCGRID 2011 conference. It discusses some work in using a GPGPU to run simulations of massively parallel computers, using the parallelism of the GPU to speed the simulation. Intriguing concept, but the execution is not without its flaws and it is unclear at least from the paper just how well this generalizes, scales, or compares to parallel simulation on a general-purpose multicore machine.

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GPU Programming: a Good Pattern to Follow?

In the March/April 2008 issue of ACM Queue, there is an article on GPU Programming by Kayvon Fatahalian and Mike Houston of Stanford that I found a very interesting read. It presents and analyzes the programming model of modern GPUs, in the most coherent and understandable way that I have seen so far. The PC GPU has a model for programming parallel hardware that might be a good pattern for other areas of processing. Programmers do not have to write explicitly parallel code, the machinery and hardware takes care of ensuring parallel behavior, as long as the code follows the assumptions made in the model.

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Heterogeneous vs homogeneous systems, revisited

I got another email from my friend with the thesis that processors will become ever more homogeneous as time goes on, while I believe in a relative heterogenezation (is that a word?) of computer architecture with many special-purpose accelerators and helper processors. This argument is put forward in a previous blog post. In this round, the arguments for homogenization are from the gaming world.

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