CoE Cluster April 2012
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Assignments
Results
Having investigated CUDA C programming for Nvidia graphics cards and the CUDA architecture, we made some performance measurements using a range of numbers of blocks and threads, executing in parallel. The test program calculated values of the Mandelbrot Set on a pixel-by-pixel basis. The Mandelbrot Set was a good choice for this test beacuse:
- It is relatively easy to program
- Every pixel has to calculated individually - there is no correlation between values of neighbouring pixels
- The image can be separated into parts which can be calculated separately and in parallel
- The time taken to calculate a complete image without parallelization is long enough to allow the performance gains from parallelization to be clearly seen
- The resulting images are very pretty (if a little strange)! :-)
The results of the benchmarking are here, as an interactive chart (hover your mouse to find out which values are represented by each line, drag to zoom and hide/reveal curves relating to the number of blocks in the legend beneath):
- CUDA Benchmark (External JavaScript)
Above: Mandelbort Set drawn in 0,12 seconds, using a single NVidia CUDA capable graphics card (GeForce GTX 460) running 32 blocks and 128 threads in each block. Total image dimension 512 x 512 pixels.
Above: Mandelbrot Set drawn in 1,2 seconds, using a Master-Worker MPI pattern with 16 worker nodes and 1 master node (which collected calculated results from different parts of the image and output them to an X Window). Total image dimension 800 x 800 pixels.
Slides
Litteratur Liste
- MPI
- Introduction to Parallel Computing
- CUDA Overview from Nvidia
- Nvidia CUDA C Programming Guide
- OpenCV Tutorial
- OpenCV Reference
- Skin Detection algorithms for use in OpenCV/CUDA trials