After nearly a month of utilizing the MSI WS60 Mobile Workstation I have to admit I am spoiled by the speed and balance of this system. The clear IPS display is a pleasure to use when mobile and I love the color images on my Dell U3011 screen, courtesy of the NVIDIA K2100M GPU plus the Optimus technology preserves battery life. Speed The following animated gif (repeated 10 … [Read more...]
MSI WS60 Mobile Workstation – Awesome CUDA-Capable, Linux, and Window Mobility
The recently released MSI mobile workstation (WS60 20 OJ 3K-004US) provides a no-compromise laptop for those who wish a thin-and-light desktop replacement at work and when traveling. This device is now my work machine of choice (that relegated a wonderful HP Z800 workstation to a remotely accessed resource). I have found that the WS60 provides a well-designed and … [Read more...]
GPUs Power Over 90% of ImageNet Deep-Learning Visual Recognition Challenge Entries
Over 90 percent of the participating teams and three of the four winners in the prestigious 2014 ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge used GPUs to enable their deep learning work. Deep learning is a fast-growing segment of machine learning that involves the creation of sophisticated, multi-level or “deep” neural networks. These networks enable powerful … [Read more...]
New PyFR Paper “Heterogeneous Computing on Mixed Unstructured Grids with PyFR”
Peter Vincent's original PyFR post on TechEnablement has been extremely popular. Readers should be happy to hear that the PyFR team has published a new paper, "Heterogeneous Computing on Mixed Unstructured Grids with PyFR", showing this Python framework can perform high-order accurate unsteady simulations of flow on mixed unstructured grids using heterogeneous multi-node … [Read more...]
Funding for HPC in the Natural Sciences at Mainz University
Many branches of the natural sciences are currently in the process of transition to the use of data-driven concepts. In recognition of this, the Carl Zeiss Foundation will provide EUR 750,000 over four years to fund the Competence Center for HPC in the Natural Sciences at the Institute of Computer Science of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). Jointly headed by Professor … [Read more...]
OpenACC Compilers Deliver 85% The Performance Of Hand-Optimized Code
Directive-based compilers offer both portability and the ability to optimized code for specific platforms such as GPUs and CPUs. A recent LCPC14 paper, "Directive-Based Compilers for GPUs", by Swapnil Ghike, Ruben Gran, Maria J. Garzaran, David Padua at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found OpenACC code generated by the PGI and Cray OpenACC compilers achieved … [Read more...]
Mix OpenACC and CUDA (including Thrust)
The NVIDIA Parallel ForAll blog shows how to mix OpenACC and CUDA (including Thrust) with the host_data construct, the deviceptr clause, and the acc_map_data() API function. … [Read more...]
CUDA 340.29 Driver Significantly Boosts GPU Performance (100s GF/s For Machine-Learning)
Reports are now coming in about performance boosts that are the result of the CUDA 6.5 production release. The Blender project reports faster rendering time with CUDA-6.5. As can be seen in the graphs below that report performance on the farbopt deep-learning teaching code, CUDA-6.5 with the NVIDIA 340.29 driver have increased performance on linear problems (PCA analysis from … [Read more...]
PyFR: A GPU-Accelerated Next-Generation Computational Fluid Dynamics Python Framework
PyFR is an open-source 5,000 line Python based framework for solving fluid-flow problems that can exploit many-core computing hardware such as GPUs! Computational simulation of fluid flow, often referred to as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), plays an critical role in the aerodynamic design of numerous complex systems, including aircraft, F1 racing cars, and wind turbines. … [Read more...]
CUDA 6.5 Production Release Includes Ubuntu 14.04 LTS!
The CUDA 6.5 production release is now out and it supports Ubuntu 14.04! Now we can all enjoy the latest CUDA and Ubuntu releases. Register for the upcoming webinars about the new features in CUDA 6.5: Aug. 26, 2014 "CUDA 6.5 Overview and Features", and Sept. 17, 2014, "Performance Overview". Meanwhile, it is time to upgrade from that older Ubuntu 12.04 release. BTW: The … [Read more...]