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NVIDIA: mobile phones, tablets and HPC (cloud)

May 12th, 2012
If you want to see what is coming up in the market of consumer-technology (PC, mobile and tablet), then NVIDIA can tell you the most. The company is very flexible, and shows time after time it really knows in which markets is currently operates and can enter. I sometimes strongly disagree with their marketing, but watch them closely as they are in the most important markets to define the near future in: PCs, Mobile/Tablet and HPC.
You might think I completely miss interconnects (buses between processors, devices and memory) and memory-technologies as clouds have a large need for high-speed data-transport, but the last 20 years have shown that this is a quite stable developing market based on IP-selling to the hardware-vendors. With the acquisition of Cray’s interconnect technology, we have seen this is serious business for Intel, so things might change indeed. For this article I want to focus on NVIDIA’s choices. » Read more: NVIDIA: mobile phones, tablets and HPC (cloud)

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Neil Trevett on OpenCL

April 21st, 2012

The Khronos Group gave some talks on their technologies in Shanghai China on the 17th of March 2012. Neil Trevett did some interesting remarks on the position of NVidia on OpenCL I would like to share with you. Neil Trevett is both an important member of Khronos and employee of NVidia. To be more precise, he is the Vice President Mobile Content of NVidia and the president of Khronos. I think we can take his comments serious, but we must be very careful as these are mixed with his personal opinions.

Regular readers of the blog have seen I am not enthusiastic at all about NVidia’s marketing, but am a big fan of their hardware. And exactly I am very positive they are bold enough in the industry to position themselves very well with the fast-changing markets of the upcoming years. Having said that, let’s go to the quotes.

All quotes were from this video. Best you can do is to start at 41:50 till 45:35.

At 44:05 he states: “In the mobile I think space CUDA is unlikely to be widely adopted“, and explains: “A party API in the mobile industry doesn’t really meet market needs“. Then continues with his vision on OpenCL: “I think OpenCL in the mobile is going to be fundamental to bring parallel computation to mobile devices” and then “and into the web through WebCL“.

Also interesting at 44:55: “In the end NVidia doesn’t really mind which API is used, CUDA or OpenCL. As long as you are get to use great GPUs“. He ends with a smile, as “great GPUs” refers to NVidia’s of course. :)

At 45:10 he puts NVidia’s plans on HPC, before getting back to : “NVidia is going to support both [CUDA and OpenCL] in HPC. In Mobile it’s going to be all OpenCL“.

At 45:23 he repeats his statements: “In the mobile space I expect OpenCL to be the primary tool“.

» Read more: Neil Trevett on OpenCL

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USB-stick sized ARM-computers

April 18th, 2012

Now that smartphones get more powerful and internet makes it possible to have all functionality and documents with you anywhere, the computer needs to be reinvented. You see all big IT-companies searching for how that can be, from Windows Metro to complete docking stations to replace the desktop by your phone. A turbulent market.

One of the new products are USB-stick sized computers. Stick them into a TV or monitor, zap in your code and you have your personal working environment. You never need to carry laptops to your hotel-room or conference, as long as a screen is available – any screen.

There are several USB-computers entering the market, but I wanted to introduce you to two. Both of these see a future in a strong processor in a portable device, and both do not have a real product with these strong processors. But you can expect that in 2013 you can have a device that can do very fast parallel processing to have a smooth Photoshop experience… at your key-ring.

» Read more: USB-stick sized ARM-computers

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PDFs of Monday 16 April

April 16th, 2012

By exception, another PDF-Monday.

OpenCL vs. OpenMP: A Programmability Debate. The one moment OpenCL and the other mom ent OpenMP produces faster code. From the conclusion: “OpenMP is more productive, while OpenCL is portable for a larger class of devices. Performance-wise, we have found a large variety of ratios between the two solutions, depending on the application, dataset sizes, compilers, and architectures.”

Improving Performance of OpenCL on CPUs. Focusing on how to optimise OpenCL. From the abstract: “First, we present a static analysis and an accompanying optimization to exclude code regions from control-flow to data-flow conversion, which is the commonly used technique to leverage vector instruction sets. Second, we present a novel technique to implement barrier synchronization.”

Variants of Mersenne Twister Suitable for Graphic Processors. Source-code at http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~m-mat/MT/MTGP/

Accelerating the FFTD method using SSE and GPUs. “The Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) method is a computational technique for modelling the behaviour of electromagnetic waves in 3D space”. This is a project-plan, but describes the theories pretty well. » Read more: PDFs of Monday 16 April

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Lots of loops

April 8th, 2012

In “Separation of compute, control and transfer” I talked about node-wise programming as a way we should embrace instead of try to replace by loops. In this article I get into loops and discuss for a few types hopw they can be run in a parallel form. Dependency is the big variable in each type: the lower the dependency on previous iterations, the better it can be parallelised. Another one is the known iteration-dimensions known before the loop is started.

The more you think about it, the more you find out that a loop is not a loop.

» Read more: Lots of loops

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Supporting OpenCL on your own hardware

April 2nd, 2012

Say you have a device which is extremely good in numerical trigoniometrics (including integrals, transformations, etc to support mainly Fourier transforms) by using massive parallelism. You also have an optimised library which takes care of the transfer to the device and the handling of trigoniometric math.

Then you find out that the strength of your company is not the device alone, but also the powerful and easy-to-use library. You also find out that companies are willing to pay for the library, if it would work with other devices too. From your own helpdesk you hear that most questions are about extending the library with specialised functions. Giving this information, you define new customer groups for device-only and library-only – so just by adopting a standard you can increase revenue. Read below which steps you have to take to adopt OpenCL.

» Read more: Supporting OpenCL on your own hardware

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