1. COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE (for Erasmus students)
Assoc.Prof. Stasys Maciulevičius
Computer Dept.

2. 3D graphics cards
It wasn't so long ago that 3D graphics cards were only expected to deliver higher frames-per-second in your favorite 3D games
The graphics companies fought over some image quality issues like the internal color processing precision and the quality of anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering, but even that was targeted at game performance and quality
Of course, there have been graphics cards for years now designed for the professional 3D market—CAD/CAM, industrial design
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3. GPU vs CPU
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4. Graphics and CPU
Physical effects, which are necessary when working with images, graphics processor calculates much faster than it has a central processing unit, for example:
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5. GPGPU
GPGPU stands for General-Purpose computation on Graphics Processing Units, also known as GPU Computing
Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are high-performance many-core processors capable of very high computation and data throughput
Once specially designed for computer graphics and difficult to program, today’s GPUs are general-purpose parallel processors with support for accessible programming interfaces and industry-standard languages such as C
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6. GPGPU
GPGPU technology is simple -- it will increase the speed of many types of tasks consumers do every day by using the GPU and the CPU in tandem for "general purpose" computations (or number crunching) that was once only handled by the CPU alone
When this technology fully matures, consumers will see noticable performance increases when they convert audio and video files, play graphics-intensive games, and in other daily tasks
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7. GP GPU
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8. GPGPU
The first GPGPU was initially created in 1978 (a programmable raster display system)
Before 2006, there were only a handful of other systems that incorporated GPGPU technology
In November 2006, AMD's website stated they started the "GPGPU revolution" with the first iteration of their GPGPU technology that has now evolved into ATI Stream
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9. Stream computing
Stream computing (or stream processing) refers to a class of compute problems, applications or tasks that can be broken down into parallel, identical operations and run simultaneously on a single processor device
These parallel data streams entering the processor device, computations taking place and the output from the device define stream computing
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10. Applications suited to Stream Computing
Applications best suited to stream computing possess two fundamental characteristics:
A high degree of arithmetic computation per system memory fetch
Computational independence - arithmetic occurs on each processing unit without needing to be checked or verified by or with arithmetic occurring on any other processing unit
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11. Applications suited to Stream Computing
Examples include:
Engineering - fluid dynamics
Mathematics - linear equations, matrix calculations
Simulations - Monte Carlo, molecular modeling, etc.
Financial - options pricing
Biological - protein structure calculations
Imaging - medical image processing
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12. GP-GPU development
Today, there are two major competing standards for GP-GPU development, essentially:
ATI's first attempt at exposing the GPU to general purpose computing tasks was through a "Close to the Metal" or CTM driver
CUDA is Nvidia's "Compute Unified Device Architecture", a programming model based on C
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13. Using the GPU's stream processors
ATI Stream and CUDA focuses on using the GPU's stream processors in tandem with the CPU to enable the entire system to handle computing-intensive applications
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14. ATI Stream
ATI Stream technology is a set of advanced hardware and software technologies that enable AMD graphics processors (GPU), working in concert with the system’s CPU, to accelerate many applications beyond just graphics
This enables better balanced platforms capable of running demanding computing tasks faster than ever
2009
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15. ATI Stream
ATI Stream technology is a set of advanced hardware and software technologies that enable AMD graphics processors (GPU), working in concert with the system’s CPU, to accelerate many applications beyond just graphics
This enables better balanced platforms capable of running demanding computing tasks faster than ever
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16. ATI Stream
ATI Stream uses parallel computing architecture that will take advantage of the graphics card's stream processors to compute problems, applications or tasks that can be broken down into parallel, identical operations and run simultaneously on a single processor device
Stream computing also takes advantage of a SIMD methodology whereas a CPU is a modified SISD methodology
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17. ATI Stream
ATI has evolved their stream computing efforts into the Stream SDK, which includes a number of features
Low-level access is provided through a more accessible CAL (Compute Abstraction Layer), and code libraries include the AMD Core Math Library (ACML), AMD Performance Library (APL), and a video transcode library called COBRA
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18. AMD FireStream™ 9270
The AMD FireStream product line provides the industry's first double-precision floating point capability on a GPU
The AMD FireStream 9270 is next generation DP-FP product
With 2GB GDDR5 memory on board and single-precision performance of 1.2 TFLOPS and double precision performance of 240 GFLOPS, the FireStream 9270 is ideal for the most demanding compute-intensive, data-parallel tasks
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19. AMD FireStream™ 9270
Using 55nm process technology, even this large-memory board consumes less than 220 watts peak (160 watts typical)
System requirements:
PCIe 2.0 based server or workstation with available x16 lane graphics slot
600 W or greater power supply
512 MB of system memory
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20. AMD FireStream™ 9270 AMD FireStream 9270 specifications:
Number of GPUs – 1
Stream Cores – 800
Floating point formats – IEEE single & double precision
GPU local memory – 2GB GDDR5
SDRAM Memory interface – 850 MHz
Peak memory bandwidth – GB/s
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21. NVidia's CUDA
NVidia's Compute Unified Device Architecture or "CUDA" platform was announced together with G80 in November 2006
A public beta version of the CUDA SDK was released in February 2007
The first version of CUDA rolled out with Tesla in June 2007, which was based on G80 and designed for high performance computing
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22. NVidia's CUDA
NVidia CUDA is a general purpose parallel computing architecture that leverages the parallel compute engine in NVidia graphics processing units to solve many complex computational problems in a fraction of the time required on a CPU
It includes the CUDA Instruction Set Architecture and the parallel compute engine in the GPU
CUDA performs two major functions that consumers should be aware of:
it helps reduce or match CPU usage by engaging the GPU’s stream processors and
it can accelerate any computing process where CUDA is enabled
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23. NVidia's CUDA
CUDA is supported on all GeForce 8-, 9-, and GTX200-series cards, and is tied fairly closely to Nvidia's GPU architecture. It should be possible to make CUDA drivers for other hardware
CUDA is relatively simple, as stream processing languages go. It's based on C, with some extensions, so it's pretty familiar to developers
Writing code that is highly parallel and manages data to work optimally in a GPU's memory systems is tricky, but the payoffs are great
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24. NVidia's CUDA
In the high performance computing (HPC) environment, where large clusters or supercomputers are purpose-built to perform specific tasks with custom software, CUDA has gained a lot of traction
Financial analysis models, oil and gas exploration software, medical imaging, fluid dynamics, and other tough "big iron" tasks are already using CUDA together with Nvidia GPUs to realize speed improvements an order of magnitude or two greater than when running on CPUs
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25.
Stanford University runs one of the most popular distributed computing applications around, It calculates protein folding on a massive scale, using thousands of computers and PlayStation 3s around the world
For awhile now the labs at Stanford have been working with ATI to produce a GPU-accelerated version of their folding software
Now, the second generation of this GPU folding app uses the more reliable and better-performing CUDA for Nvidia GPUs, or CAL for ATI cards
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26.
A quick look at the Client Stats page shows that there are, at the time of this writing, about 7600 active GPUs running the FAH app, generating around 840 teraflops of computational power (it's not a theoretical peak number, it's real work running the FAH computations)
That's somewhere around 110 gigaflops per GPU, on average. To put that in perspective, the regular windows CPU client is about one gigaflop per client (it's a mix of the single-threaded client and the multi-core SMP version)
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27. GPGPU in supercomputer
In 2009 China has unveiled its fastest supercomputer Tianhe (Milky Way)
The supercomputer will reach a performance of 1.2 Petaflops and with a Linpack result of Teraflops it would have climbed up to fourth place on the current Top500 list
Tianhe is equipped with 6,144 Intel Xeon CPUs and 5,120 AMD GPUs (Radeon HD 4870X2 graphics cards)
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28. Intel Larrabee
Intel has developed a new Intel® microarchitecture, codenamed Larrabee, to meet the increasing compute and memory intensive demands of the latest PC games and high-performance computing applications, such as image processing, physical simulation, and medical and financial analytics
Larrabee architecture's programmability creates new opportunities for developers to innovate in the visual computing realm
Larrabee microarchitecture features a number of hardware advances, including a many-core throughput design, for a wide range of highly parallel visual computing applications
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29. Intel Larrabee
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30. Intel Larrabee
A conceptual model of the Larrabee architecture. The actual numbers of cores, texture units, memory controllers, and so on will vary a lot. Also, the structure of the bus and the placement of devices on the ring are more complex than shown..
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31. Intel Larrabee: vector data types
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32. Intel Larrabee
Larrabee can be considered a hybrid between a multi-core CPU and a GPU, and has similarities to both. Its coherent cache hierarchy and x86 architecture compatibility are CPU-like, while its wide SIMD vector units and texture sampling hardware are GPU-like
As a GPU, Larrabee will support traditional rasterized 3D graphics (Direct3D & OpenGL) for games. However, Larrabee's hybrid of CPU and GPU features should be suitable for general purpose GPU (GPGPU) or stream processing tasks
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33. Intel Larrabee
Larrabee will differ from other discrete GPUs currently on the market such as the GeForce 200 Series and the Radeon 4000 series in three major ways:
Larrabee will use the x86 instruction set with Larrabee-specific extensions.[10]
Larrabee will feature cache coherency across all its cores.[10]
Larrabee will include very little specialized graphics hardware, instead performing tasks like z-buffering, clipping, and blending in software, using a tile-based rendering approach
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34. Intel Larrabee
The x86 processor cores in Larrabee will be different in several ways from the cores in current Intel CPUs such as the Core 2 Duo or Core i7:
Larrabee's x86 cores will be based on the much simpler Pentium P54C design which is still being maintained for use in embedded applications. The P54C-derived core is superscalar but does not include out-of-order execution, though it has been updated with modern features such as x86-64 support, similar to Intel Atom. In-order execution means lower performance for individual cores, but since they are smaller, more can fit on a single chip, increasing overall throughput
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35. Intel Larrabee
Each Larrabee core contains a 512-bit vector processing unit, able to process 16 single precision floating point numbers at a time
Larrabee includes one major fixed-function graphics hardware feature: texture sampling units. These perform trilinear and anisotropic filtering and texture decompression
Larrabee has a 1024-bit (512-bit each way) ring bus for communication between cores and to memory
Larrabee includes explicit cache control instructions to reduce cache thrashing during streaming operations which only read/write data once. Explicit prefetching into L2 or L1 cache is also supported.
Each core supports 4-way simultaneous multithreading, with 4 copies of each processor register
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