2008 Meetings
December 3, 2008: "AMD's Stream Computing Platform: From the Hardware to the Softwares" by Dr. Justin Hensley, AMD Graphics Product Group
Abstract: GPUs can do more than just graphics. Some compute-bound problems at the bleeding edge of technologies ranging from financial modeling to seismic simulation for oil exploration to the medical sciences are seeing 10x to 100x and beyond speedup from the same GPUs used to play your favorite PC game. This brief talk will give you an introduction to AMD's groundbreaking work in bringing GPUs into this new compute frontier.
Biography: Justin Hensley is member of technical staff in AMD's Graphics Product Group Office of the CTO focusing on parallel programming using graphics processors. Since joining AMD, Justin has been involved with several projects including face recognition, depth extraction, game physics. Recently, he has been involved with driving the compute requirements, and the associated software stacks, of next generation graphics processors. Justin received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007. He also holds an M.S. Electrical Engineering and a B.S. with a double major in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Engineering from the University of California at Davis.
October 1, 2008: "Parallel Computing with CUDA on GPUs" by Dr. John Nickolls & Dr. Massimiliano Fatica, Nvidia Corporation
Abstract: The CUDA parallel programming model provides a straightforward means of describing inherently parallel computations. It lets programmers write scalable parallel programs with a minimal extension of the C language. NVIDIA's Tesla GPU architecture delivers high computational throughput on massively parallel problems. This talk describes how to write CUDA C programs, outlines the parallel computing architecture of a 240-processor GPU, and surveys applications of CUDA to different problems and the parallel speedups obtained on GPUs over traditional sequential CPU codes.
Biography:
John Nickolls is director of architecture at NVIDIA for GPU computing. He was previously with Broadcom, Silicon Spice, Sun Microsystems, and was a co-founder of MasPar Computer. His interests include parallel processing systems, languages, and architectures. Nickolls has a BS in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of Illinois, and MS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
Massimiliano Fatica is a Senior Applied Engineer at NVIDIA where he works in the area of GPU computing (high-performance computing and clusters). Prior to joining NVIDIA, he was a research staff member at Stanford University where he worked on applications for the Stanford Streaming Supercomputer. He holds a laurea in Aeronautical Engineering and a PhD in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from the University of Rome "La Sapienza".