12,641 research outputs found

    Computational Physics on Graphics Processing Units

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    The use of graphics processing units for scientific computations is an emerging strategy that can significantly speed up various different algorithms. In this review, we discuss advances made in the field of computational physics, focusing on classical molecular dynamics, and on quantum simulations for electronic structure calculations using the density functional theory, wave function techniques, and quantum field theory.Comment: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference, PARA 2012, Helsinki, Finland, June 10-13, 201

    TechNews digests: Jan - Mar 2010

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    TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month

    Some Notes on the Past and Future of Lisp-Stat

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    Lisp-Stat was originally developed as a framework for experimenting with dynamic graphics in statistics. To support this use, it evolved into a platform for more general statistical computing. The choice of the Lisp language as the basis of the system was in part coincidence and in part a very deliberate decision. This paper describes the background behind the choice of Lisp, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of this choice. The paper then discusses some lessons that can be drawn from experience with Lisp-Stat and with the R language to guide future development of Lisp-Stat, R, and similar systems.

    Acceleration of stereo-matching on multi-core CPU and GPU

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    This paper presents an accelerated version of a dense stereo-correspondence algorithm for two different parallelism enabled architectures, multi-core CPU and GPU. The algorithm is part of the vision system developed for a binocular robot-head in the context of the CloPeMa 1 research project. This research project focuses on the conception of a new clothes folding robot with real-time and high resolution requirements for the vision system. The performance analysis shows that the parallelised stereo-matching algorithm has been significantly accelerated, maintaining 12x and 176x speed-up respectively for multi-core CPU and GPU, compared with non-SIMD singlethread CPU. To analyse the origin of the speed-up and gain deeper understanding about the choice of the optimal hardware, the algorithm was broken into key sub-tasks and the performance was tested for four different hardware architectures

    Teaching Parallel Programming Using Java

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    This paper presents an overview of the "Applied Parallel Computing" course taught to final year Software Engineering undergraduate students in Spring 2014 at NUST, Pakistan. The main objective of the course was to introduce practical parallel programming tools and techniques for shared and distributed memory concurrent systems. A unique aspect of the course was that Java was used as the principle programming language. The course was divided into three sections. The first section covered parallel programming techniques for shared memory systems that include multicore and Symmetric Multi-Processor (SMP) systems. In this section, Java threads was taught as a viable programming API for such systems. The second section was dedicated to parallel programming tools meant for distributed memory systems including clusters and network of computers. We used MPJ Express-a Java MPI library-for conducting programming assignments and lab work for this section. The third and the final section covered advanced topics including the MapReduce programming model using Hadoop and the General Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU).Comment: 8 Pages, 6 figures, MPJ Express, MPI Java, Teaching Parallel Programmin

    Building-in quality rather than assessing quality afterwards: a technological solution to ensuring computational accuracy in learning materials

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    [Abstract]: Quality encompasses a very broad range of ideas in learning materials, yet the accuracy of the content is often overlooked as a measure of quality. Various aspects of accuracy are briefly considered, and the issue of computational accuracy is then considered further. When learning materials are produced containing the results of mathematical computations, accuracy is essential: but how can the results of these computations be known to be correct? A solution is to embed the instructions for performing the calculations in the materials, and let the computer calculate the result and place it in the text. In this way, quality is built into the learning materials by design, not evaluated after the event. This is all accomplished using the ideas of literate programming, applied to the learning materials context. A small example demonstrates how remarkably easy the ideas are to apply in practice using the appropriate technology. Given that the technology is available and is easy to use, it would appear imperative that the approach discussed is adopted to improve quality in learning materials containing computational results

    Scalable partitioning for parallel position based dynamics

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    We introduce a practical partitioning technique designed for parallelizing Position Based Dynamics, and exploiting the ubiquitous multi-core processors present in current commodity GPUs. The input is a set of particles whose dynamics is influenced by spatial constraints. In the initialization phase, we build a graph in which each node corresponds to a constraint and two constraints are connected by an edge if they influence at least one common particle. We introduce a novel greedy algorithm for inserting additional constraints (phantoms) in the graph such that the resulting topology is q-colourable, where ˆ qˆ ≥ 2 is an arbitrary number. We color the graph, and the constraints with the same color are assigned to the same partition. Then, the set of constraints belonging to each partition is solved in parallel during the animation phase. We demonstrate this by using our partitioning technique; the performance hit caused by the GPU kernel calls is significantly decreased, leaving unaffected the visual quality, robustness and speed of serial position based dynamics
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