EPJ B Colloquium: Large scale simulations on GPU clusters

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Published on 15 June 2015

Graphics Processing Units (GPU) are currently used as a cost-effective platform for computer simulations and big-data processing. Large scale applications require that multiple GPUs work together, but the efficiency obtained with cluster of GPUs is, at times, suboptimal because the GPU features are not exploited at their best.

In this EPJ B Colloquium, Massimo Bernaschi and colleagues describe how it is possible to achieve an excellent efficiency for applications in statistical mechanics, particle dynamics and networks analysis by using suitable memory access patterns and mechanisms like CUDA streams, profiling tools, etc. Similar concepts and techniques may be applied also to other problems like the solution of Partial Differential Equations.