2,099 research outputs found
GPUs as Storage System Accelerators
Massively multicore processors, such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs),
provide, at a comparable price, a one order of magnitude higher peak
performance than traditional CPUs. This drop in the cost of computation, as any
order-of-magnitude drop in the cost per unit of performance for a class of
system components, triggers the opportunity to redesign systems and to explore
new ways to engineer them to recalibrate the cost-to-performance relation. This
project explores the feasibility of harnessing GPUs' computational power to
improve the performance, reliability, or security of distributed storage
systems. In this context, we present the design of a storage system prototype
that uses GPU offloading to accelerate a number of computationally intensive
primitives based on hashing, and introduce techniques to efficiently leverage
the processing power of GPUs. We evaluate the performance of this prototype
under two configurations: as a content addressable storage system that
facilitates online similarity detection between successive versions of the same
file and as a traditional system that uses hashing to preserve data integrity.
Further, we evaluate the impact of offloading to the GPU on competing
applications' performance. Our results show that this technique can bring
tangible performance gains without negatively impacting the performance of
concurrently running applications.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 201
Analysing the Performance of GPU Hash Tables for State Space Exploration
In the past few years, General Purpose Graphics Processors (GPUs) have been
used to significantly speed up numerous applications. One of the areas in which
GPUs have recently led to a significant speed-up is model checking. In model
checking, state spaces, i.e., large directed graphs, are explored to verify
whether models satisfy desirable properties. GPUexplore is a GPU-based model
checker that uses a hash table to efficiently keep track of already explored
states. As a large number of states is discovered and stored during such an
exploration, the hash table should be able to quickly handle many inserts and
queries concurrently. In this paper, we experimentally compare two different
hash tables optimised for the GPU, one being the GPUexplore hash table, and the
other using Cuckoo hashing. We compare the performance of both hash tables
using random and non-random data obtained from model checking experiments, to
analyse the applicability of the two hash tables for state space exploration.
We conclude that Cuckoo hashing is three times faster than GPUexplore hashing
for random data, and that Cuckoo hashing is five to nine times faster for
non-random data. This suggests great potential to further speed up GPUexplore
in the near future.Comment: In Proceedings GaM 2017, arXiv:1712.0834
Performance Analysis of a Novel GPU Computation-to-core Mapping Scheme for Robust Facet Image Modeling
Though the GPGPU concept is well-known
in image processing, much more work remains to be done
to fully exploit GPUs as an alternative computation
engine. This paper investigates the computation-to-core
mapping strategies to probe the efficiency and scalability
of the robust facet image modeling algorithm on GPUs.
Our fine-grained computation-to-core mapping scheme
shows a significant performance gain over the standard
pixel-wise mapping scheme. With in-depth performance
comparisons across the two different mapping schemes,
we analyze the impact of the level of parallelism on
the GPU computation and suggest two principles for
optimizing future image processing applications on the
GPU platform
PyCUDA and PyOpenCL: A Scripting-Based Approach to GPU Run-Time Code Generation
High-performance computing has recently seen a surge of interest in
heterogeneous systems, with an emphasis on modern Graphics Processing Units
(GPUs). These devices offer tremendous potential for performance and efficiency
in important large-scale applications of computational science. However,
exploiting this potential can be challenging, as one must adapt to the
specialized and rapidly evolving computing environment currently exhibited by
GPUs. One way of addressing this challenge is to embrace better techniques and
develop tools tailored to their needs. This article presents one simple
technique, GPU run-time code generation (RTCG), along with PyCUDA and PyOpenCL,
two open-source toolkits that support this technique.
In introducing PyCUDA and PyOpenCL, this article proposes the combination of
a dynamic, high-level scripting language with the massive performance of a GPU
as a compelling two-tiered computing platform, potentially offering significant
performance and productivity advantages over conventional single-tier, static
systems. The concept of RTCG is simple and easily implemented using existing,
robust infrastructure. Nonetheless it is powerful enough to support (and
encourage) the creation of custom application-specific tools by its users. The
premise of the paper is illustrated by a wide range of examples where the
technique has been applied with considerable success.Comment: Submitted to Parallel Computing, Elsevie
Acceleration-as-a-Service: Exploiting Virtualised GPUs for a Financial Application
'How can GPU acceleration be obtained as a service in a cluster?' This
question has become increasingly significant due to the inefficiency of
installing GPUs on all nodes of a cluster. The research reported in this paper
is motivated to address the above question by employing rCUDA (remote CUDA), a
framework that facilitates Acceleration-as-a-Service (AaaS), such that the
nodes of a cluster can request the acceleration of a set of remote GPUs on
demand. The rCUDA framework exploits virtualisation and ensures that multiple
nodes can share the same GPU. In this paper we test the feasibility of the
rCUDA framework on a real-world application employed in the financial risk
industry that can benefit from AaaS in the production setting. The results
confirm the feasibility of rCUDA and highlight that rCUDA achieves similar
performance compared to CUDA, provides consistent results, and more
importantly, allows for a single application to benefit from all the GPUs
available in the cluster without loosing efficiency.Comment: 11th IEEE International Conference on eScience (IEEE eScience) -
Munich, Germany, 201
- …