Date of Award

4-23-2008

Document Type

Thesis open access

Abstract

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are quickly becoming viable alternatives for certain simulations currently run on CPUs. They are an attractive option because of their inherent parallelism: like older vector-style supercomputers, they perform repeated calculations on large data sets by processing multiple elements at once. Performance is further improved by their built-in mathematical functions. This paper describes experiments comparing the performance of a GPU with that of a CPU for an astrophysical simulation, using NVIDIA’s CUDA programming interface for the GPU.

Share

COinS