GPSME

A General Toolkit for “GPUtilisation” in SME Applications

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 Obiettivo del progetto (Objective)

'The recent explosion of GPU (Graphical Processing Unit) power has not been fully utilised by many SMEs, possibly because GPU programming requires specialist skills different from those of conventional programming. GPSME will provide the SME participants with a simple route to accessing GPU power. Each of the SME participants is facing increasing competition in the market and GPSME will allow them to greatly improve their products in terms of speed and quality without major overheads. By involving close cooperation between the SMEs and RTD performers, GPSME will develop a toolkit to automate the conversion of existing sequential CPU code to an optimal GPU implementation. With such a toolkit, the SMEs will be able to convert their existing CPU code without committing significant effort and time. It will also support the execution of advanced techniques within acceptable runtimes and hence allow the SMEs to use more complex computing models in their new products. This will bring them major commercial benefits and significantly improve their market positions. Technically, GPSME features techniques to adapt automatic parallelization to the latest GPU compute architecture to deliver optimal performance. This is expected to greatly improve on traditional CPU-based automatic parallelization. The literature review has suggested that the techniques in this area are still very much in their infancy and that there is no existing toolkit that can benefit the SMEs immediately. The application areas of the SME participants are widely differing, so GPSME will produce a breakthrough that will open the door for great performance gains across many areas of application. This development will be particularly suitable for SMEs that focus applications on moderate platforms. In the long term, the outcomes of GPSME will benefit many companies and improve industrial competitiveness across the whole European Union.'

Introduzione (Teaser)

To develop new products, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) may need expensive computer resources. An alternative is to convert existing machines into parallel processors, which would provide the power but at low cost.

Descrizione progetto (Article)

Parallel computing means to divide computer tasks among two or more processing chips. That gives a tremendous speed improvement compared to single-chip machines.

The EU-funded project 'A general toolkit for GPUtilisation in SME applications' (http://www.gp-sme.eu (GPSME)) brought super-computing concepts to the office. Modern computers generally have an under-utilised second processor in the form of the graphics processing unit (GPU). The eight-member project aimed to network the GPU with the main processor. GPSME ran for two years to the end of September 2013.

GPSME developed and tested tools for converting existing application code to utilise both processors. The resulting project software automatically recognises sections of application code suitable for conversion, and efficiently carries out the conversion. GPSME's work improves conventional automatic parallel conversion methods.

The result is high computer performance at minimal cost. Presently, no other system is available to assist SME competitiveness in this way. Thanks to GPSME, European SMEs will have the resources they need to develop new products. That will mean opportunity and improved competiveness for European business.