Ingress, a multi-player GPS based location game created Google' Naintic labs continues to grow. If you like geocaching, chances are you will like Ingress. Gameplay consists of establishing "portals" at places of public art, landmarks, monuments, etc., and linking them to create virtual triangular fields over geographic areas. Progress in the game is measured by the number of … [Read more...]
Intel Xeon Phi Benefits Commercial Engineering Simulation Code
ANSYS and Intel worked closely together to optimize the first commercial engineering simulation package multi-core Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 v2 and v3 families and the many-core Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor. Results indicate a 3.1x speedup after upgrading from a Xeon V2 to V3 solution, and a further 1.7x speedup when using an Intel® Xeon Phi™ 7120 coprocessor (or total … [Read more...]
ACM Paper Observes FPGA, GPU, CPU Energy Efficiency Hierarchy
Sparsh Mittal and Jeff Vetter provide a survey of the comparative energy efficiency of GPUs relative to FPGAs and CPUs in their Jan. 2015 ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) paper, "A Survey of Methods for Analyzing and Improving GPU Energy Efficiency" in which they observe a general energy efficiency hierarchy where, "it is clear that although for majority of works, FPGAs are … [Read more...]
Plan Ahead – SC15 Housing Site Open For Room Reservations!
The SC15 housing site is now open through October. The conference takes place Nov 15-20 in Austin, Texas. IMPORTANT DATES AND DEADLINES March 2, 2015 – Hotel reservation system opens September 20, 2015 – Last day for submitting occupancy lists for exhibitor room blocks October 16, 2015 – Last day for making hotel reservations October 16, 2015 – Last day for canceling … [Read more...]
NVIDIA Titan X Powers Games and Virtual Reality
NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced NVIDIA's latest GPU, the Titan X, in a surprise appearance at the 2015 Game Developers Conference. Jen-Hsun claims it is the most powerful GPU on the planet. The announcement followed a presentation by Epic Games' co-founder Tim Sweeney about the convergence of photorealistic imagery, film, video games, architecture, industrial design, and … [Read more...]
$199 Tegra X1 NVIDIA Shield Console Supports 4K TV
NVIDIA announced the Tegra X1 based Shield console that will be available in May. Customers can be notified for ordering via the bottom right "notify me" icon here. The device contains 3GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage along with a microSD slot, two USB 3.0 ports, and Bluetooth. Included is a gigabit Ethernet port and 2 x 2 802.11ac … [Read more...]
Concise Comparision Adds OpenMP Versus OpenACC To CUDA Versus OpenCL Debates
The debate over OpenMP versus OpenACC for manycore and heterogeneous computing is starting to heat up. Michael Wong (CEO of OpenMP Corp), Barbara Chapman (Univ. Houston), and Yonghong Yan (Assistant Prof. Univ. Oakland and OpenMP ARB representative) have written a nice, quick read, comparative article on HPCWire: "A Comparison of Heterogeneous and Manycore … [Read more...]
Provisional OpenCL 2.1 Enables Kernels Written Using a Subset of C++14 and Uses SPIR-V
The Khronos™ Group today announced the ratification and public release of the OpenCL™ 2.1 provisional specification viewable at www.khronos.org/opencl/ so developers and implementers can provide feedback before finalization at the OpenCL forums. Comments can be made via https://www.khronos.org/opencl/opencl_feedback_forum. The OpenCL 2.1 C++ kernel language is a static … [Read more...]
OpenCL Programmed FPGAs Claim a 3X Performance-to-Power Advantage at Microsoft
The Microsoft white paper, "Accelerating Deep Convolutional Neural Networks Using Specialized Hardware" describes an OpenCL programmed implementation of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) that touts a conservative estimate of 3x the performance-to-power advantage over NVIDIA GPUs when running on new FPGA hardware. Doug Berger posted on the Inside Microsoft Research … [Read more...]
NP-Complete Parallel Thread Placement Addressed in Milliseconds via MIT “Best Paper” Heuristic
The problem of jointly allocating computations and data is a known NP-hard problem. A heuristic proposed by MIT researchers Nathan Beckmann, Po-An Tsai, and Daniel Sanchez recently the best-paper award at the IEEE Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture for a place-and-route algorithm that runs in milliseconds and finds a solution that is more than 99 percent as … [Read more...]