Astrophysical Supercomputing with GPUs: Critical Decisions for Early Adopters

General purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) is dramatically changing the landscape of high performance computing in astronomy. In this paper, we identify and investigate several key decision areas, with a goal of simplyfing the early adoption of GPGPU in astronomy. We consider the merits of OpenCL as an open standard in order to reduce risks associated with coding in a native, vendor-specific programming environment, and present a GPU programming philosophy based on using brute force solutions. We assert that effective use of new GPU-based supercomputing facilities will require a change in approach from astronomers. This will likely include improved programming training, an increased need for software development best-practice through the use of profiling and related optimisation tools, and a greater reliance on third-party code libraries. As with any new technology, those willing to take the risks, and make the investment of time and effort to become early adopters of GPGPU in astronomy, stand to reap great benefits.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in PAS

Robust and Fast 3D Scan Alignment using Mutual Information

This paper presents a mutual information (MI) based algorithm for the estimation of full 6-degree-of-freedom (DOF) rigid body transformation between two overlapping point clouds. We first divide the scene into a 3D voxel grid and define simple to compute features for each voxel in the scan. The two scans that need to be aligned are considered as a collection of these features and the MI between these voxelized features is maximized to obtain the correct alignment of scans. We have implemented our method with various simple point cloud features (such as number of points in voxel, variance of z-height in voxel) and compared the performance of the proposed method with existing point-to-point and point-to- distribution registration methods. We show that our approach has an efficient and fast parallel implementation on GPU, and evaluate the robustness and speed of the proposed algorithm on two real-world datasets which have variety of dynamic scenes from different environments

A Hybrid Multi-GPU Implementation of Simplex Algorithm with CPU Collaboration

The simplex algorithm has been successfully used for many years in solving linear programming (LP) problems. Due to the intensive computations required (especially for the solution of large LP problems), parallel approaches have also extensively been studied. The computational power provided by the modern GPUs as well as the rapid development of multicore CPU systems have led OpenMP and CUDA programming models to the top preferences during the last years. However, the desired efficient collaboration between CPU and GPU through the combined use of the above programming models is still considered a hard research problem. In the above context, we demonstrate here an excessively efficient implementation of standard simplex, targeting to the best possible exploitation of the concurrent use of all the computing resources, on a multicore platform with multiple CUDA-enabled GPUs. More concretely, we present a novel hybrid collaboration scheme which is based on the concurrent execution of suitably spread CPU-assigned (via multithreading) and GPU-offloaded computations. The experimental results extracted through the cooperative use of OpenMP and CUDA over a notably powerful modern hybrid platform (consisting of 32 cores and two high-spec GPUs, Titan Rtx and Rtx 2080Ti) highlight that the performance of the presented here hybrid GPU/CPU collaboration scheme is clearly superior to the GPU-only implementation under almost all conditions. The corresponding measurements validate the value of using all resources concurrently, even in the case of a multi-GPU configuration platform. Furthermore, the given implementations are completely comparable (and slightly superior in most cases) to other related attempts in the bibliography, and clearly superior to the native CPU-implementation with 32 cores.Comment: 12 page

Two-dimensional batch linear programming on the GPU

This paper presents a novel, high-performance, graphical processing unit-based algorithm for efficiently solving two-dimensional linear programs in batches. The domain of two-dimensional linear programs is particularly useful due to the prevalence of relevant geometric problems. Batch linear programming refers to solving numerous different linear programs within one operation. By solving many linear programs simultaneously and distributing workload evenly across threads, graphical processing unit utilization can be maximized. Speedups of over 22 times and 63 times are obtained against state-of-the-art graphics processing unit and CPU linear program solvers, respectively