KSEF R&D Excellence: Supercomputing Using Commodity Graphics Processing Units with Applications to Information Retrieval

We propose to build supercomputers using multiple Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for non-graphical computations that can take advantage of the array processing capability in each GPU.The enabling hardware technology is that the PCl-express bus allows multiple graphics cards, hence multiple fast GPUs,to be placed in a single PC. Multiple such PCscan be used to build a cluster supercomputer. Our vision is to create the software technologies that will allow non-graphical supercomputing applications to take advantage of any number of GPUsto achieve high performance at commodity prices. Our team has the unique combination of expertise in GPUprogramming; programming language, compiler and OS-interface development; and high-performance parallel application development. Our goal in this proposal is to produce preliminary results that will help secure large-scale funding from federal and/or corporate sponsors. The preliminary study will focus on exploring systems software support options, defining an appropriate structure for the software, and implementing core portions of one or two applications.