
Battle planning for supercomputer warfare - toni
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/new_research_provides/
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phamilton
As a simple benchmark for the capabilites of GPGPU software, I've been testing
a hotplate simulation. In a 6400x6400 grid, the future temperature of each
cell is an average of the cells around it. I've written it in C (single
threaded) and it takes 40 minutes to run on an Intel nehelem. I've written it
in Matlab and it takes 7 hours. Finally I wrote it in Matlab using the GPGPU
plugin Jacket. It took 20 minutes. That's a 2x speed up over the serial code,
with all the abstraction and overhead of Matlab. Next is a test in C with
CUDA, but I was still very impressed with the performance of GPGPU in Matlab.

In our HPC lab, we see plugins like Jacket to be a valid substitute for
translation of calculations from Matlab to C/fortran. While not the most
efficient use of hardware, it is very simple to do and can drastically speed
up many applications.

