PMPP workshop at NCSA

I attended PMPP (Programming Massively Parallel Processors Agenda) workshop at NCSA last week (July 10th, 2008). It was great opportunity to see what we can do with parallel processors and modern powerful GPUs. Recently Multi-core or many-core has been drawing great attentions in various research communities and people are still struggling to find a way to maximize its capabilities in the coming 80-core era. In other side, Peoples have been also trying to utilize GPUs as a parallel computing unit. Modern GPUs are equipped  with tens of, or hundreds of cores, which can be used for computing intensive jobs. The workshop was about all of these: Multicores and GPUs.

Here are some highlights:

• Parallel GPU: Mostly two venders, nVidia and ATI, are actively developing this market by continually supplying powerful hardware and SDKs. nVidia provides CUDA and ATI does Stream SDK for programming kits.
• nVidia's parallel GPU with CUDA: Lightweight threads running on nVidia GPU (8 to 240 cores). Designed with parallel execution in mind, while general CPU is not. GPU can be considered as massively parallel manycore machine.
• Autotuning for multicore : Multicore tuning parameter spaces are so huge to investigate one by one. We can overcome this by systematic approaches. Details can be seen from the papers by Samuel Williams and Kaushik Datta. In their paper, many multicore tuning techniques are introduced.
• Cell broadband engine (Cell BE): Interesting demonstration was shown by Hema Reddy from IBM. Look at this article and clip. I saw the more interesting clip in the workshop but I can't find the exact one in the Internet.
• Multicore/GPU researchers : look at Pedro Trancoso, John Stone, and