Generic Computing on a Graphics Processing Unit

Abstract

With the increasing demand for better, more realistic and more detailed graphics, more and more effort and money is put into improving the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) in a computer. As a result of this, the GPU has become a very powerful computing unit with its own programmable processor and a unique architecture. Unlike CPUs, GPUs are special purpose hardware, designed to perform tasks often encountered in computer graphics. While CPU manufacturers only just start using multiple cores in a CPU, parallelism is already in long use in GPUs. Though GPUs are designed for graphics computations, they can be used for more. This research project explores the application of GPUs both in graphics and in generic computing. The emphasis will be on the latter. We explain how the GPU can be used to build useful programs that can speed up simple cellular automata to over 50 times faster than on a conventional processor. We also show that complex computations like the gravitational N-body problem can be turned into a GPU based version to speed up computation. Acknowledgement