[PRL] POPL Trip Report

[Mitchell Wand]

On Jan 10, 2008 9:32 AM, William D Clinger <will at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:

> Concerning CUDA, Mitch wrote:
> > Sounds like neat stuff.  Do we have anybody interested in this?
>
> Gene Cooperman.  He had some role in organizing a workshop
> on this at NU a few months back.  I attended that workshop
> in the morning, but got bored and left after lunch.


Yup, I've separately written Gene.

> Anybody who has large parallelizable computations for which this might
> > be useful?
>
> The GPU cards are designed for massively data-parallel
> floating-point algorithms.  The newer cards are versatile
> enough for novel uses, e.g. a snapshot-at-the-beginning
> algorithm that marks all live objects in a heap by having
> every word of memory check to see if it is a reference
> that has been marked; if so, then set the mark word for
> the word it points to; iterate that process to a fixed
> point.  The problems are that the cards don't have enough
> memory for algorithms like the one I just described, and
> the cost of copying large amounts of data between memory
> systems is hard to overcome.


The new cards have lots of memory.  I don't have the numbers, but that was
one of the things they emphasized.

--Mitch
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