How General-Purpose can a GPU be?

Authors

  • Philip Machanick

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18489/sacj.v0i57.347

Keywords:

GPGPU, multicore designs, graphics pipeline

Abstract

The use of graphics processing units (GPUs) in general-purpose computation (GPGPU) is a growing field. GPU instruction sets, while implementing a graphics pipeline, draw from a range of single instruction multiple datastream (SIMD) architectures characteristic of the heyday of supercomputers. Yet only one of these SIMD instruction sets has been of application on a wide enough range of problems to survive the era when the full range of supercomputer design variants was being explored: vector instructions. This paper proposes a reconceptualization of the GPU as a multicore design with minimal exotic modes of parallelism so as to make GPGPU truly general.

Author Biography

Philip Machanick

associate professor, computer science

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Published

2015-12-10

Issue

No. 57 (2015)

Section

Viewpoints

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