{"id":903,"date":"2013-03-06T22:10:33","date_gmt":"2013-03-06T20:10:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.ulrichard.ch\/?p=903"},"modified":"2013-03-06T22:10:33","modified_gmt":"2013-03-06T20:10:33","slug":"gpgpu-programming-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ulrichard.ch\/blog\/?p=903","title":{"rendered":"GPGPU programming class"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s already a while back that I completed the coursera class &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/class.coursera.org\/hetero-2012-001\/class\/index\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Heterogeneous Parallel Programming<\/a>&#8220;. It was mainly concerned with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nvidia.com\/object\/cuda_home_new.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">cuda<\/a>, which is Nvidia&#8217;s GPGPU framework. <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/GPGPU\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">GPGPU<\/a> is about running common computations on the graphics card. The class also quickly covered <a href=\"https:\/\/www.khronos.org\/opencl\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">OpenCL<\/a>, OpenACC, C++AMP and MPI.<\/p>\n<p>In the programming assignments, we juggled a lot with low level details such as distributing the work load to thread blocks, which I almost didn&#8217;t care about when using OpenCL so far. After seeing cuda and OpenCL, it was a little surprise, that C++AMP is indeed a more convenient programming model, and not just a C++ compiler for the graphics card. Let&#8217;s hope that it gets ported to other platforms soon.<\/p>\n<p>The most eye opening revelation for me was, that it is possible to parallelize <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Prefix_sum\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">prefix sum computation<\/a>. When I was first presented with the problem, I thought that&#8217;s a showcase for serial execution. But apparently it&#8217;s not. <a href=\"http:\/\/http.developer.nvidia.com\/GPUGems3\/gpugems3_ch39.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Making it parallel<\/a> is a two step process. First make a number of blocks, and compute the sum at the boundary for each one using something like a tree structure (in parallel). Once you have that, it&#8217;s more obvious, how to parallelize the rest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s already a while back that I completed the coursera class &#8220;Heterogeneous Parallel Programming&#8220;. It was mainly concerned with cuda, which is Nvidia&#8217;s GPGPU framework. GPGPU is about running common computations on the graphics card. The class also quickly covered OpenCL, OpenACC, C++AMP and MPI. In the programming assignments, we juggled a lot with low [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1],"tags":[67,98,158,160],"class_list":["post-903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","category-uncategorized","tag-cuda","tag-gpgpu","tag-online-education","tag-opencl"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ulrichard.ch\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ulrichard.ch\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ulrichard.ch\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ulrichard.ch\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ulrichard.ch\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ulrichard.ch\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ulrichard.ch\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ulrichard.ch\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ulrichard.ch\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}