Summer Student Internship working on the GPU
This summer internship consisted of learning computer programming skills and languages including Thrust, CUDA, C++, C and Linux. The application of this programming is for use in GPU, graphics processing units, that are processors that perform math intensive calculations rapidly in three dimensions typically in advanced video games (“NVIDIA GeForce…”). Our goal is to apply this technology towards exa-scale computing on the LANL supercomputing infrastructure. My mentors use these machines to do computations. The completed algorithms include KD tree and Top K. In order to access the GPU, CUDA was used. CUDA is a parallel computer architecture for general computing on the GPUs. There are different means by which to access CUDA. The first approach uses libraries, like Thrust, Linear Algebra, and Signal and Image Processing. Another approach parallelizes loops in Fortran or C and in the last approach people develop custom parallel algorithms using familiar language (“What is CUDA”). The algorithms I worked on this summer use the first approach of using the thrust library of parallel algorithms and data structures.