Article | REF: H1013 V1

Fully programmable graphics processors (GPU)

Authors: Daniel ETIEMBLE, David DEFOUR

Publication date: November 10, 2018, Review date: January 5, 2021

You do not have access to this resource.
Click here to request your free trial access!

Already subscribed? Log in!


Overview

Français

ABSTRACT

After a brief review of the different steps from graphics boards (1980s) to programmable graphics processing units or GPUs (2007), we present the main GPU features. CUDA’s initial release (2007) and the tremendous increase in GPU accelerated scientific codes have resulted in spectacular technological breakthroughs in these processors. We detail them according to their different aspects: software, hardware, memory hierarchies, and techniques to exploit parallelism. They explain the increasing importance of GPUs in numerous applications (scientific calculation, neural networks, imaging, bio-computing, mining of crypto-currency, etc.).

Read this article from a comprehensive knowledge base, updated and supplemented with articles reviewed by scientific committees.

Read the article

AUTHORS

  • Daniel ETIEMBLE: Engineer from INSA Lyon - Professor Emeritus, Université Paris Sud

  • David DEFOUR: Doctorate in Computer Science from ENS Lyon - Senior Lecturer at the University of Perpignan

 INTRODUCTION

The year 2007 saw the birth of NVIDIA's CUDA ecosystem, and the period 2007-2017 has seen an explosion in the number of scientific computing codes accelerated by graphics processing units (GPUs). There are currently three major suppliers of graphics processors: AMD, Nvidia and Intel, with different segments: GPUs for workstations and PCs, GPUs for mobile systems and APUs (Accelerated Processor Units), in which CPUs and GPUs are integrated on the same chip.

We briefly review the various stages that led from the graphics card pipeline of the 1980s to the first unified, fully programmable graphics processors in 2007. The operating principle of a GPU is detailed, using the Fermi architecture as an example. The implementation of the SIMT (Single Instruction Multiple Thread) approach is explained. We then look at the various aspects of ten years of technological advances in general-purpose computing on GPUs (GPGPU).

The evolution of market share, GPGPU applications and software developments are presented, including details of the ecosystem providing high-level APIs (close to C) and low-level APIs (close to hardware).

The evolution of hardware is explained, with the different micro-architectural generations, power consumption problems and the contribution of computing units and specialized instructions.

The memory hierarchy and its evolution are detailed, with technological contributions and the simplification introduced by the "unified memory" approach.

Various techniques can be used to improve the exploitation of parallelism, notably in schedulers and hardware parallelism management devices (synchronization and atomic operations).

While retaining their original role as graphics display units, GPUs have become a key player in massively parallel computing. They exploit the fine-grained data parallelism found in a wide range of applications, from high-performance computing to neural networks and the genome. The SIMT execution model gives them a significant advantage over CPUs for massive data parallelism.

You do not have access to this resource.

Exclusive to subscribers. 97% yet to be discovered!

You do not have access to this resource.
Click here to request your free trial access!

Already subscribed? Log in!


The Ultimate Scientific and Technical Reference

A Comprehensive Knowledge Base, with over 1,200 authors and 100 scientific advisors
+ More than 10,000 articles and 1,000 how-to sheets, over 800 new or updated articles every year
From design to prototyping, right through to industrialization, the reference for securing the development of your industrial projects

KEYWORDS

CPU   |   GPU   |   CUDA   |   NVIDIA


This article is included in

Electronics

This offer includes:

Knowledge Base

Updated and enriched with articles validated by our scientific committees

Services

A set of exclusive tools to complement the resources

Practical Path

Operational and didactic, to guarantee the acquisition of transversal skills

Doc & Quiz

Interactive articles with quizzes, for constructive reading

Subscribe now!

Ongoing reading
Fully programmable graphics processors (GPUs)