Title: GRASSY: Free Computation on GPUs

Speaker: Matthew Sinclair, University of Wisconsin - Madison

Date/Time: 9:00 a.m., Tuesday, December 7, 2010       

Location: CSRI Building/Room 90 (Sandia NM)

Brief Abstract: I describe GRASSY, a system for stellar spectral synthesis where the core problem is interpolation between pre-computed intensity values.  In GRASSY, we map these pre-computed tables of intensity values to the GPU's texture memory. Interpolation then becomes a texture lookup where the hardware automatically performs the interpolation, albeit at very low precision. Our mathematical framework reasons about the impact of this precision and our performance results show 100X speedups over serial CPU implementations and 33X speedups over parallelized CPU implementations. This work generalizes the GPU texture units as computation engines and opens up new problems for GPU acceleration.

CSRI POC: Jim Ang, 505-844-0068