December 2013: Videos are not ready yet, but link will be put here.

Amsterdam, 20 June – Applied GPGPU-days in Amsterdam. Keep your agenda free for this event.

What can you do with GPUs to speed up computations? This year we can see various examples where OpenCL and CUDA have been used. We hope to give you an answer if you can use GPUs for your software, research or algorithm.

After the success of last year (fully booked with 66 attendees), we now have reserved a larger location with place for 100 people. Difference with last year is that we focus more on applications, less on technical aspects.

The program has been made public recently:

Title of talk	Company/Institute	Presenter
Introduction to GPGPU and GPU-architectures	StreamHPC	Vincent Hindriksen
Blender Cycles & Tiles: Enhancing user experience	AtMind bv	Monique Dewanchand & Jeroen Bakker
XeonPhi vs K20: The fight of the titans	SURFsara	Evghenii Gaburov
A real-time simulation technique for ship-ship and ship-port interaction	PMH bv	Jo Pinkster
CUDA Accelerated Neural Networks	LIACS	Ana Balevic
Efficient Reconstruction of Biological Networks via Transitive Reduction on GPUs	TU Eindhoven	Anton Wijs
Running Petsc on GPUs with an example from fluid dynamics	SURFsara	Thomas Geenen
Connected Component Labelling, an embarrassingly sequential algorithm	Leeuwarden University	Jaap van de Loosdrecht
Visualizing sound and vibrations using a GPU and a 1024-channel microphone array	TU Eindhoven	Wouter Ouwens
Gravitational N-body simulations on 1 to many GPUs	Leiden observatory	Jeroen Bédorf

A few demos will be shown.

For more information, see the Platform Parallel webpage. Also to find other events by the platform.

Tickets are €75,-. If you are from a Dutch university or research institute affiliated with SURF, your ticket has been fully sponsored by SURFsara.

Associated events in the Netherlands

For the technical aspects (GPU-programming techniques, optimisation, etc) we have a special day: the GPU Dev Day 2013. More information on the Platform Parallel webpage. Date and place will be made public in June.

The first Khronos Meetup Benelux will take place just before the Applied GPGPU day, on 19 June in Amsterdam. More information on the meetup-page.

The Tokyo Demo Fest 2013 is one of the many demo-parties around the globe. At such parties is where great programmers meet great artists and show off what came out of their collaborations.

The winner of this year used OpenCL to compute real-time procedurally generated geometries. For the rest C++, OpenGL and Gamemonkey Script was used.

Tech features: curl noise, volumetric textures, Perlin noise, mesh deformations, HDR/bloom, film grain, fractals, Hermite splines, Tweens and quaternion iridescent particles.

The creator, Tokyo-based Eddie Lee, has done more projects – be sure to visit his homepage. I hope more demosceners start using the power of OpenCL to get more out of their demo’s.

Do you see where below kernel is used? Hint: check the other videos of Eddie.

__kernel void curlnel( 
                      __read_only image3d_t volume,  
                      sampler_t volumeSampler,  
                      __global float4 *output,  
                      float speed 
                      ) 
{ 
    uint index = get_global_id(0); 
    uint numParticles = get_global_size(0); 
    float indexNormalized = (float)index/numParticles; 

    // read from 3D texture 
    float4 vertData = output[index]; 

    float3 samplePos = vertData.s012; 
    samplePos = samplePos+(float3)(0.5f); 

    float4 voxel = (read_imagef(volume, volumeSampler, 
                   (float4)(samplePos,1.0f))); 

    vertData.s012 += voxel.xyz*speed; 

    output[index] = vertData; 
}

According to GPUVerify (see previous post) the line starting with “float4 voxel” has an error.

StreamHPC supports the ERSA conference, 22-25 July in Las Vegas. At that conference there will be an award given to “Best Young Entrepreneur” and I’d like you to send in a proposal. The winner gets an NVIDIA Tesla K20!

Young entrepreneurs and academics with a great product/project are invited to present their solution. As the event draws around 2000 people, you get the attention needed to show-case your new company or research-group. Your solution does not need to be based on FPGAs or GPUs, as long as Von Neumann’s architecture is not in it.

Read the information below or directly go to the ERSA-NVIDIA awards-homepage.
“Von Neumann’s architecture lasted for 75 years.”
That genius can no longer lead us into the new age of computing that is upon us. This competition seeks to acknowledge those pioneers that are helping to build the new computing landscape”

Submission of Proposals for ERSA-NVIDIA award Candidates
Deadline: 6 May 2013 31 May 2013 – extended deadline!
Send proposals to org@ersaconf.org

The Award is devoted for entrepreneurs developing tools, advanced technologies and opportunities for supporting applications, both academic and commercial, across broad area of high-performance, embedded systems implemented as multicore systems and reconfigurable heterogeneous parallel processing systems.

The Award Committee includes:

Leading Universities

•  Stanford University, USA, Prof. Michael Flynn
•  Imperial College London, UK, Prof. Wayne Luk
• Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, Prof. Joerg Henkel
• Keio University, Japan, Prof. Hideharu Amano
• Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, Prof. Simon See

Leading Companies (tentative list):

• NVIDIA, Can Ozdoruk, Product Manager
• Altera, Steve Casselmanm, Principal Engineer
• National Instruments, Hugo Andrade, Principal Architect

For more info go to: http://ersaconf.org/awards/

If you have any question, just ask them in the comments or send us an email.

Embedded processors always have had the focus on low-energy. Now a combination of Moore’s law, the frequency-wall and multi-processor developments have made it possible for these processors to compete in completely new market segments. Most notable due to impressive advancements in graphics IP.
We are now looking at four groups who are interested in learning from each other:

• The embedded processor market
• The FPGA market
• The HPC and server market
• The GPGPU market

And answer the question: how can we get more out of low-energy processors by looking at other industries?

The goal of the LEAP conference is to bring these three groups together. Creating the windows to each other and paving roads over the newly constructed bridges. This makes it one of its kind. Half of the conference is focused on quality information sharing and the other half on networking. For more information, check the website of the LEAP-conference. StreamHPC is a co-organiser.

Call for papers is now open! Programme is filled!

Continue reading “LEAP-conference call for papers” →

For more information on the program, contact us. For information on sponsoring, contact Tim Lewis of CroftEdge.

Website with more info and ticket-sales will open 1 February.

Every now and then I read stories on Bitcoins (Wikipedia-article), as GPUs are used a lot to “mine” Bitcoins. They have some extensive benchmarks, and also their discussions giving me insights in specific parts of accelerators like GPUs. Also is this group very upwards if it comes to accepting new techniques. Today something changed: they are a bank now. One of the thoughts I had with this, I’d like to share with you.

If you look at various types of currencies, you see they all have various goals (trade, power, resources, energy, properties, etc). The inequality and differences are even more important than the amount. Various currencies are entangled to a certain goal or resource, but there is nothing entangled strongly to technology. Here is where Bitcoins come in…

Bitcoins are entangled with compute-power – a current benchmark for technological progress.

In this article I’d like to share how the tech-economy and Bitcoins are entangled, seen from the perspective of computing. I left out a lot of the “rules of economy” and hope you can put these in – the below text is just to guide you through the thought-process only. Disagreement is only good – as we learn all from it.

Continue reading “The entanglement of Bitcoins and compute-capabilities” →

NOTE: there are many contradicting sources out there, so there are mistakes in this article. Please give me feedback via twitter, mail or comments, so all the info can be completed.

Yes, another post in the answer-to series. At SC12 Intel tries to steal away the show from the Tesla K20 and FirePro S10000.

After two years of waiting Intel finally comes with an accelerator-card: the Xeon Phi. Compare it if NVIDIA would have skipped the GTX 200 series and now has presented the GTX 500 series. Or maybe even the GTX 600 series – we cannot tell yet.

The Phi is not a compute-card as we know it. As you cannot do a 1-to-1 comparison between AMD GCN architecture and NVIDIA Kepler, neither can be easily compared to the Phi. But this article should give an idea on where it is positioned.

Continue reading “Intel’s answer to AMD and NVIDIA: the XEON Phi 5110P” →

Two months ago I wrote about the FirePro S9000 – AMD’s answer to the K10 – and was already looking forward to this K20. Where in the gaming world, it hardly matters what card you buy to get good gaming performance, in the compute-world it does. AMD presented 3.230 TFLOPS with 6GB of memory, and now we are going to see what the K20 can do.

The K20 is very different from its predecessor, the K10. Biggest difference is the difference between the number of double precision capability and this card being more powerful using a single GPU. To keep power-usage low, it is clocked at only 705MHz compared to 1GHz of the K10. I could not find information of the memory-bandwidth.

ECC is turned on by default, hence you see it presented having 5GB. No information yet if this card also has ECC on the local memories/caches.

Continue reading “NVIDIA’s answer to FirePro S9000: the TESLA K20” →