The Test and Evaluation Uses of Heterogeneous Computing: GPGPUs and Other Approaches

Abstract

The test and evaluation community faces conflicting pressures: Provide more computing power and reduce electrical power requirements, both on the range and in the laboratory. The authors present some quantifiable benefits from the implementation of General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs) as heterogeneous processors. This produces power, space, cooling, and maintenance benefits that they have documented. Other efforts in the field of power reduction techniques will be outlined, e.g., the efficient low-power microprocessor approach of Prof. William Dally and IBM's well-publicized Blue Gene project. The utility of all of these techniques for the test and evaluation community is assessed. The authors will report on several aspects of their experience with GPGPUs: programmability, performance of codes implemented in several areas of computational science, and the compute power per unit of electrical consumption. An overview of code design and implementation approaches is discussed.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 2011
Accession Number
ADA539274

Entities

People

  • Dan M. Davis
  • Gene Wagenbreth
  • Robert F. Lucas

Organizations

  • University of Southern California

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Agent-Based Simulations
  • Central Processing Units
  • Computational Science
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Simulations
  • Computers
  • Department Of Defense
  • Energy Consumption
  • Floating Point Operations
  • Graphics Processing Unit
  • High Performance Computing
  • Information Science
  • Jet Propulsion
  • Operating Systems
  • Test And Evaluation
  • Training

Readers

  • Database Systems and Applications
  • Energy Conservation and Renewable Energy Engineering.
  • Sensor Fusion and Tracking Systems.

Technology Areas

  • Space
  • Space - Hall-Effect Thruster