Study on availability of GPU for scientific and engineering calculations

Sakamoto, Kensaku ; Kobayashi, Seiji*

Recently, the number of scientific and engineering calculations is increasing. It is said that GPUs (Graphic Processing Units) have much higher peak floating-point processing power and memory bandwidth than CPUs (Central Processing Units). We have studied the effectiveness of GPUs by applying them to fundamental scientific and engineering calculations with CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) development tools. The results have shown as follow; (1) GPGPU (General-Purpose computations on GPUs) is effective for such calculations as matrix operation, FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) and CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) in nuclear research region. (2) Highly-advanced programming is required for bringing out high performance of GPUs and double-precision. (3) ECC (Error Correction Code) in graphic memory systems supports are inadequate.