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This part of the book aims to provide a gentle introduction to the world of general-purpose computation on graphics processing units, or "GPGPU," as it has come to be known. The text is intended to be understandable to programmers with no graphics experience, as well as to those who have been programming graphics for years but have little knowledge of parallel computing for other applications.
Since the publication of GPU Gems, GPGPU has grown from something of a curiosity to a well-respected active new area of graphics and systems research.
Why would you want to go to the trouble of converting your computational problems to run on the GPU? There are two reasons: price and performance. Economics and the rise of video games as mass-market entertainment have driven down prices to the point where you can now buy a graphics processor capable of several hundred billion floating-point operations per second for just a few hundred dollars.
The GPU is not well suited to all types of problems, but there are many examples of applications that have achieved significant speedups from using graphics hardware. The applications that achieve the best performance are typically those with high "arithmetic intensity"; that is, those with a large ratio of mathematical operations to memory accesses. These applications range all the way from audio processing and physics simulation to bioinformatics and computational finance.
Anybody with any exposure to modern computing cannot fail to notice the rapid pace of technological change in our industry. The first chapter in this part, Chapter 29, "Streaming Architectures and Technology Trends," by John Owens of the University of California, Davis, sets the stage for the chapters to come by describing the trends in semiconductor design and manufacturing that are driving the evolution of both the CPU and the GPU. One of the important factors driving these changes is the memory "gap"—the fact that computation speeds are increasing at a much faster rate than memory access speeds. This chapter also introduces the "streaming" computational model, which is a reasonably close match to the characteristics of modern GPU hardware. By using this style of programming, application programmers can take advantage of the GPU's massive computation and memory bandwidth resources, and the resulting programs can achieve large performance gains over equivalent CPU implementations.
Chapter 30, "The GeForce 6 Series GPU Architecture," by Emmett Kilgariff and Randima Fernando of NVIDIA, describes in detail the design of a current state-of-the-art graphics processor, the GeForce 6800. Cowritten by one of the lead architects of the chip, this chapter includes many low-level details of the hardware that are not available anywhere else. This information is invaluable for anyone writing high-performance GPU applications.
The remainder of this part of the book then moves on to several tutorial-style chapters that explain the details of how to solve general-purpose problems using the GPU.
Chapter 31, "Mapping Computational Concepts to GPUs," by Mark Harris of NVIDIA, discusses the issues involved with converting computational problems to run efficiently on the parallel hardware of the GPU. The GPU is actually made up of several programmable processors plus a selection of fixed-function hardware, and this chapter describes how to make the best use of these resources.
Chapter 32, "Taking the Plunge into GPU Computing," by Ian Buck of Stanford University, provides more details on the differences between the CPU and the GPU in terms of memory bandwidth, floating-point number representation, and memory access models. As Ian mentions in his introduction, the GPU was not really designed for general-purpose computation, and getting it to operate efficiently requires some care.
One of the most difficult areas of GPU programming is general-purpose data structures. Data structures such as lists and trees that are routinely used by CPU programmers are not trivial to implement on the GPU. The GPU doesn't allow arbitrary memory access and mainly operates on four-vectors designed to represent positions and colors. Particularly difficult are sparse data structures that do not have a regular layout in memory and where the size of the structure may vary from element to element.
Chapter 33, "Implementing Efficient Parallel Data Structures on GPUs," by Aaron Lefohn of the University of California, Davis; Joe Kniss of the University of Utah; and John Owens gives an overview of the stream programming model and goes on to explain the details of implementing data structures such as multidimensional arrays and sparse data structures on the GPU.
Traditionally, GPUs have not been very good at executing code with branches. Because they are parallel machines, they achieve best performance when the the same operation can be applied to every data element. Chapter 34, "GPU Flow-Control Idioms," by Mark Harris and Ian Buck, explains different ways in which flow-control structures such as loops and if statements can be efficiently implemented on the GPU. This includes using the depth-test and z-culling capabilities of modern GPUs, as well as the branching instructions available in the latest versions of the pixel shader hardware.
Cliff Woolley of the University of Virginia has spent many hours writing GPGPU applications, and (like many of our other authors) he has published several papers based on his research. In Chapter 35, "GPU Program Optimization," he passes on his experience on the best ways to optimize GPU code, and how to avoid the common mistakes made by novice GPU programmers. It is often said that premature optimization is the root of all evil, but it has to be done at some point.
On the CPU, it is easy to write programs that have variable amounts of output per input data element. Unfortunately, this is much more difficult on a parallel machine like the GPU. Chapter 36, "Stream Reduction Operations for GPGPU Applications," by Daniel Horn of Stanford University, illustrates several ways in which the GPU can be programmed to perform filtering operations that remove elements from a data stream in order to generate variable amounts of output. He demonstrates how this technique can be used to efficiently implement collision detection and subdivision surfaces.
Only time will tell what the final division of labor between the CPU, the GPU, and other processors in the PC ecosystem will be. One thing is sure: the realities of semiconductor design and the memory gap mean that data-parallel programming is here to stay. By learning how to express your problems in this style today, you can ensure that your code will continue to execute at the maximum possible speed on all future hardware.
Simon Green, NVIDIA Corporation
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
GPU gems 2 : programming techniques for high-performance graphics and general-purpose
computation / edited by Matt Pharr ; Randima Fernando, series editor.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-321-33559-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Computer graphics. 2. Real-time programming. I. Pharr, Matt. II. Fernando, Randima.
T385.G688 2005
006.66—dc22
2004030181
GeForce™ and NVIDIA Quadro® are trademarks or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation.
Nalu, Timbury, and Clear Sailing images © 2004 NVIDIA Corporation.
mental images and mental ray are trademarks or registered trademarks of mental images, GmbH.
Copyright © 2005 by NVIDIA Corporation.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America. Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Text printed in the United States on recycled paper at Quebecor World Taunton in Taunton, Massachusetts.
Second printing, April 2005
To everyone striving to make today's best computer graphics look primitive tomorrow