Date Available
12-7-2011
Year of Publication
2009
Degree Name
Master of Science (MS)
Document Type
Thesis
College
Engineering
Department
Electrical Engineering
First Advisor
Dr. Henry G. Dietz
Abstract
GPUs offer high-performance floating-point computation at commodity prices, but their usage is hindered by programming models which expose the user to irregularities in the current shared-memory environments and require learning new interfaces and semantics.
This thesis will demonstrate that the message-passing paradigm can be conceptually cleaner than the current data-parallel models for programming GPUs because it can hide the quirks of current GPU shared-memory environments, as well as GPU-specific features, behind a well-established and well-understood interface. This will be shown by demonstrating a proof-of-concept MPI implementation which provides cleaner, simpler code with a reasonable performance cost. This thesis will also demonstrate that, although there is a virtualization constraint imposed by MPI, this constraint is harmless as long as the virtualization was already chosen to be optimal in terms of a strong execution model and nearly-optimal execution time. This will be demonstrated by examining execution times with varying virtualization using a computationally-expensive micro-kernel.
Recommended Citation
Young, Bobby Dalton, "MPI WITHIN A GPU" (2009). University of Kentucky Master's Theses. 614.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/gradschool_theses/614
