Single Instruction Multiple Thread Research Articles

GPU-accelerated 3-D model-based tracking

Model-based approaches to tracking the pose of a 3-D object in video are effective but computationally demanding. While statistical estimation techniques, such as the particle filter, are often employed to minimize the search space, real-time performance remains unachievable on current generation CPUs. Recent advances in graphics processing units (GPUs) have brought massively parallel computational power to the desktop environment and powerful developer tools, such as NVIDIA Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA), have provided programmers with a mechanism to exploit it. NVIDIA GPUs' single-instruction multiple-thread (SIMT) programming model is well-suited to many computer vision tasks, particularly model-based tracking, which requires several hundred 3-D model poses to be dynamically configured, rendered, and evaluated against each frame in the video sequence. Using 6 degree-of-freedom (DOF) rigid hand tracking as an example application, this work harnesses consumer-grade GPUs to achieve real-time, 3-D model-based, markerless object tracking in monocular video.

Massively parallel differential evolution—pattern search optimization with graphics hardware acceleration: an investigation on bound constrained optimization problems

This paper presents a novel parallel Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm with local search for solving function optimization problems, utilizing graphics hardware acceleration. As a population-based meta-heuristic, DE was originally designed for continuous function optimization. Graphics Processing Units (GPU) computing is an emerging desktop parallel computing technology that is becoming popular with its wide availability in many personal computers. In this paper, the classical DE was adapted in the data-parallel CPU-GPU heterogeneous computing platform featuring Single Instruction-Multiple Thread (SIMT) execution. The global optimal search of the DE was enhanced by the classical local Pattern Search (PS) method. The hybrid DE---PS method was implemented in the GPU environment and compared to a similar implementation in the common computing environment with a Central Processing Unit (CPU). Computational results indicate that the GPU-accelerated SIMT-DE-PS method is orders of magnitude faster than the corresponding CPU implementation. The main contribution of this paper is the parallelization analysis and performance analysis of the hybrid DE---PS with GPU acceleration. The research results demonstrate a promising direction for high speed optimization with desktop parallel computing on a personal computer.

GPU Accelerated Adams–Bashforth Multirate Discontinuous Galerkin FEM Simulation of High-Frequency Electromagnetic Fields

A multirate Adams-Bashforth (AB) scheme for simulation of electromagnetic wave propagation using the discontinuous Galerkin finite element method (DG-FEM) is presented. The algorithm is adapted such that single-instruction multiple-thread (SIMT) characteristic for the implementation on a graphics processing unit (GPU) is preserved. A domain decomposition strategy respecting the multirate classification for computation on multiple GPUs is presented. Accuracy and performance is analyzed with help of suitable benchmarks.

Nonlinear optimization with a massively parallel Evolution Strategy–Pattern Search algorithm on graphics hardware

This paper presents a massively parallel Evolution Strategy–Pattern Search Optimization (ES–PS) algorithm with graphics hardware acceleration on bound constrained nonlinear continuous optimization problems. The algorithm was specifically designed for a graphic processing unit (GPU) hardware platform featuring ‘Single Instruction Multiple Thread’ (SIMT). Evolution Strategy is a population-based evolutionary algorithm for solving complex optimization problems. GPU computing is an emerging desktop parallel computing platform. The hybrid ES–PS optimization method was implemented in the GPU environment and compared to a similar implementation on Central Processing Units (CPU). Computational results indicated that GPU-accelerated SIMT–ES–PS method was orders of magnitude faster than the corresponding CPU implementation. The main contribution of this paper was the parallelization analysis and performance analysis of the hybrid ES–PS with GPU acceleration. The computational results demonstrated a promising direction for high speed optimization with desktop parallel computing on a personal computer (PC).

Efficient evaluation methods of elementary functions suitable for SIMD computation

Data-parallel architectures like SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) or SIMT (Single Instruction Multiple Thread) have been adopted in many recent CPU and GPU architectures. Although some SIMD and SIMT instruction sets include double-precision arithmetic and bitwise operations, there are no instructions dedicated to evaluating elementary functions like trigonometric functions in double precision. Thus, these functions have to be evaluated one by one using an FPU or using a software library. However, traditional algorithms for evaluating these elementary functions involve heavy use of conditional branches and/or table look-ups, which are not suitable for SIMD computation. In this paper, efficient methods are proposed for evaluating the sine, cosine, arc tangent, exponential and logarithmic functions in double precision without table look-ups, scattering from, or gathering into SIMD registers, or conditional branches. We implemented these methods using the Intel SSE2 instruction set to evaluate their accuracy and speed. The results showed that the average error was less than 0.67 ulp, and the maximum error was 6 ulps. The computation speed was faster than the FPUs on Intel Core 2 and Core i7 processors.

CUDASW++2.0: enhanced Smith-Waterman protein database search on CUDA-enabled GPUs based on SIMT and virtualized SIMD abstractions

BackgroundDue to its high sensitivity, the Smith-Waterman algorithm is widely used for biological database searches. Unfortunately, the quadratic time complexity of this algorithm makes it highly time-consuming. The exponential growth of biological databases further deteriorates the situation. To accelerate this algorithm, many efforts have been made to develop techniques in high performance architectures, especially the recently emerging many-core architectures and their associated programming models.FindingsThis paper describes the latest release of the CUDASW++ software, CUDASW++ 2.0, which makes new contributions to Smith-Waterman protein database searches using compute unified device architecture (CUDA). A parallel Smith-Waterman algorithm is proposed to further optimize the performance of CUDASW++ 1.0 based on the single instruction, multiple thread (SIMT) abstraction. For the first time, we have investigated a partitioned vectorized Smith-Waterman algorithm using CUDA based on the virtualized single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) abstraction. The optimized SIMT and the partitioned vectorized algorithms were benchmarked, and remarkably, have similar performance characteristics. CUDASW++ 2.0 achieves performance improvement over CUDASW++ 1.0 as much as 1.74 (1.72) times using the optimized SIMT algorithm and up to 1.77 (1.66) times using the partitioned vectorized algorithm, with a performance of up to 17 (30) billion cells update per second (GCUPS) on a single-GPU GeForce GTX 280 (dual-GPU GeForce GTX 295) graphics card.ConclusionsCUDASW++ 2.0 is publicly available open-source software, written in CUDA and C++ programming languages. It obtains significant performance improvement over CUDASW++ 1.0 using either the optimized SIMT algorithm or the partitioned vectorized algorithm for Smith-Waterman protein database searches by fully exploiting the compute capability of commonly used CUDA-enabled low-cost GPUs.

Hybrid of genetic algorithm and local search to solve MAX-SAT problem using nVidia CUDA framework

General Purpose computing over Graphical Processing Units (GPGPUs) is a huge shift of paradigm in parallel computing that promises a dramatic increase in performance. But GPGPUs also bring an unprecedented level of complexity in algorithmic design and software development. In this paper we describe the challenges and design choices involved in parallelizing a hybrid of Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Local Search (LS) to solve MAXimum SATisfiability (MAX-SAT) problem on a state-of-the-art nVidia Tesla GPU using nVidia Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). MAX-SAT is a problem of practical importance and is often solved by employing metaheuristics based search methods like GAs and hybrid of GA with LS. Almost all the parallel GAs (pGAs) designed in the last two decades were designed for either clusters or MPPs. Unfortunately, very little research is done on the implementation of such algorithms over commodity graphics hardware. GAs in their simple form are not suitable for implementation over the Single Instruction Multiple Thread (SIMT) architecture of a GPU, and the same is the case with conventional LS algorithms. In this paper we explore different genetic operators that can be used for an efficient implementation of GAs over nVidia GPUs. We also design and introduce new techniques/operators for an efficient implementation of GAs and LS over such architectures. We use nVidia Tesla C1060 to perform several numerical tests and performance measurements and show that in the best case we obtain a speedup of 25×. We also discuss the effects of different optimization techniques on the overall execution time.

Quantum computer simulation using the CUDA programming model

Quantum computing emerges as a field that captures a great theoretical interest. Its simulation represents a problem with high memory and computational requirements which makes advisable the use of parallel platforms. In this work we deal with the simulation of an ideal quantum computer on the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA), as such a problem can benefit from the high computational capacities of Graphics Processing Units (GPU). After all, modern GPUs are becoming very powerful computational architectures which is causing a growing interest in their application for general purpose. CUDA provides an execution model oriented towards a more general exploitation of the GPU allowing to use it as a massively parallel SIMT (Single-Instruction Multiple-Thread) multiprocessor. A simulator that takes into account memory reference locality issues is proposed, showing that the challenge of achieving a high performance depends strongly on the explicit exploitation of memory hierarchy. Several strategies have been experimentally evaluated obtaining good performance results in comparison with conventional platforms.

Four styles of parallel and net programming

This paper reviews the programming landscape for parallel and network computing systems, focusing on four styles of concurrent programming models, and example languages/libraries. The four styles correspond to four scales of the targeted systems. At the smallest coprocessor scale, Single Instruction Multiple Thread (SIMT) and Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) are considered. Transactional memory is discussed at the multicore or process scale. The MapReduce style is examined at the datacenter scale. At the Internet scale, Grid Service Markup Language (GSML) is reviewed, which intends to integrate resources distributed across multiple datacenters.