The Graphics Card as a Stream Computer

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tations performed by a graphics card. The operations them-. selves are very simple, … ering that performing a computation on a graphics card is …

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Content
The Graphics Card as a Stream Computer
Suresh Venkatasubramanian
AT&T Labs - Research
1 Introduction
Massive data sets have radically changed our understanding
of how to design efficient algorithms; the streaming
paradigm, whether it in terms of number of passes of an
external memory algorithm, or the single pass and limited
memory of a stream algorithm, appears to be the dominant
method for coping with large data.
A very different kind of massive computation has had the
same effect at the level of the CPU. It has long been observed
[Backus 1977] that the traditional Von Neumann-style
architecture creates memory bottlenecks between the CPU
and main memory, and much of chip design in the past many
years has been focused on methods to alleviate this bottleneck,
by way of fast memory, caches, prefetching strategies
and the like. However, all of this has made the memory
bottleneck itself the focus of chip optimization efforts, and
has reflected in the amount of real estate on a chip devoted
to caching and memory access circuitry, as compared to the
ALU itself [Duca et al. 2003].
For compute-intensive operations, this is an unacceptable
tradeoff. The most prominent example is…