From Graphic Processing Unit to General Purpose Graphic Processing Unit
Yichun Gu · Journal of Wuhan University · 2013
This paper defines the outline of GPU(graphic processing unit),the general purpose computation,the programming model and the environment for GPU.Besides,it introduces the evolution process from GPU to GPGPU(general purpose graphic processing unit),and the change from non-uniform render architecture to the unified render architecture and the next Fermi architecture in details.Then it compares GPGPU architecture with multi-core GPU architecture and distributed cluster architecture from the perspective of software and hardware.When doing the middle grain level thread data intensive parallel computing,the multi-core and multi-thread should be utilized.When doing the coarse grain network computing,the cluster computing should be utilized.When doing the fine grained compute intensive parallel computing,the general purpose computation should be adopted.Meanwhile,some classical applications of GPGPU have been mentioned.At last,this paper demonstrates the further developments and research hotspots of GPGPU,which are automatic parallelization of GPGPU,multi-language support and performance optimization of CUDA,and introduces the classic application of GPGPU.