GPU Computing: Past, Present, and Future

September 15, 2010 @ 10 AM (Central Time)

Modern GPUs have outgrown their graphics heritage in many ways to emerge as the world's most successful parallel computing architecture. The GPUs that consumers buy to play video games provide a level of massively parallel computation that was once the preserve of supercomputers like the MasPar and Connection Machine. As this audience knows well, the raw computational horsepower of these chips has expanded their reach well beyond graphics. Today's GPUs not only render video game frames, they also accelerate physics computations, video transcoding, image processing, astrophysics, protein folding, seismic exploration, computational finance, astronomy - the list goes on and on.

When thinking about the future of GPUs it is important to reflect on the past. How did this peripheral grow into a processing powerhouse found everywhere from medical clinics to radiotelescopes to supercomputers? Why the graphics card and not the modem, or the mouse? Have GPUs really outgrown graphics and will they thus evolve into pure HPC processors? (hint: no)

This talk is intended as a sort of "State of the Unoin" for GPU computing. I'll briefly cover the dual heritage of GPU's, both in terms of supercomputing and the evolution of fixed function graphics pipelines. I'll discuss "computational graphics", the evolution of graphics itself into general-purpose computational problem, and how that impacts GPU design and GPU computing. Finally I'll describe the important problems and research topics facing GPU computing practitioners and researchers.

Bio:
Dr. David Luebke
Director of Research
NVIDIA Corporation
http://luebke.us

David Luebke helped found NVDIA research in 2006 after eight years on the faculty of the University of Virginia. Luebke received his PH.D. under Fred Brooks at the Unviersity of North Carolina in 1998. His principal areas of research interests are GPU computing and real-time computer graphics. Luebke's honors include the NVIDIA Distinguished inventor award, the NSF CAREER and DOE Early Career PI awards, and the ACM Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics "Test of Time Award". Dr. Luebke has co-authored a book, a SIGGRAPH Electronic piece, a major museum exhibit visited by over 110,000 people, and dozens of papers, articles, chapters, and patents.

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