Type of Talk: UTCS Colloquium/ Architecture

Speaker/Af

filiation: David Luebke/NVIDIA Research

Date/Time: Monday, October 1

2, 2009, 3:30 pm to 4:30 pm

Location: ACES 2.402

Host: Steve

Keckler

Talk Title: "Graphics Hardware & GPU Computing: Pa

st, Present, and Future"

Talk Abstract:

Modern GPUs hav

e emerged as the world’s most successful parallel architecture. GPUs provi

de a level of massively parallel computation that was once the preserve of

supercomputers like the MasPar and Connection Machine. For example, NVIDIA

''s GeForce GTX 280 is a fully programmable, massively multithreaded chip

with up to 240 cores, 30,720 threads and capable of performing up to a tr

illion operations per second. The raw computational horsepower of these chi

ps has expanded their reach well beyond graphics. Today''s GPUs not only re

nder video game frames, they also accelerate physics computations, video

transcoding, image processing, astrophysics, protein folding, seismic e

xploration, computational finance, radioastronomy - the list goes on and

on. Enabled by platforms like the CUDA architecture, which provides a scal

able programming model, researchers across science and engineering are acc

elerating applications in their discipline by up to two orders of magnitude

. These success stories, and the tremendous scientific and market opportun

ities they open up, imply a new and diverse set of workloads that in turn

carry implications for the evolution of future GPU architectures.

In this talk I will discuss the evolution of GPUs from fixed-function gra

phics accelerators to general-purpose massively parallel processors. I will
briefly motivate GPU computing and explore the transition it represents in
massively parallel computing: from the domain of supercomputers to that of
commodity "manycore" hardware available to all. I will discuss
the goals, implications, and key abstractions of the CUDA architecture.

Finally I will close with a discussion of future workloads in games, high-

performance computing, and consumer applications, and their implications

for future GPUs including the newly announced "Fermi" architect

ure.

Speaker Bio: 

Dr. David Luebke
Senior Manager,
NVIDIA Research
NVIDIA Corporation
http://luebke.us

D

avid Luebke helped found NVIDIA Research in 2006 after eight years on the f

aculty of the University of Virginia. Luebke received his Ph.D. under Fred

Brooks at the University of North Carolina in 1998. His principal research

interests are GPU computing and real-time computer graphics. Luebke''s hono

rs include the NVIDIA Distinguished Inventor award, the NSF CAREER and DOE
Early Career PI awards, and the ACM Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics

"Test of Time Award". Dr. Luebke has co-authored a book, a SIG

GRAPH Electronic Theater piece, a major museum exhibit visited by over 110

,000 people, and dozens of papers, articles, chapters, and patents.

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--------
The Computer Architecture Seminar Series is sponsored jointly
by the
Departments of Computer Science and Electrical & Computer
Engineering 
and is supported by a grant from IBM.

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