Stanford Pervasive Parallelism Lab (PPL)

On Friday, Stanford launched the Pervasive Parallelism Lab (PPL).  There's been lots of press describing it.  The general plan for the lab is to develop a common paradigm for programming new architectures like GPU's, the Cell processor, Intel's Larabee, as well as multi-core CPUs.  This is something we at FAH are very interested in, as we have had to have a unique code path for each of these (i.e. a separate code for the high performance part of the ATI GPU, NVIDIA GPU, PS3, and SMP).  Having a single code path for all would be very, very exciting to keep FAH code development onto new hardware going smoothly.

Comments

[ChemSpiderMan]

There is a discussion presently going on regarding a comparison of FPGA, GPU and the Cell/B.E processors for the purpose of computational computing. See here: http://www.simbiosys.ca/blog/2008/05/03/the-fast-and-the-furious-compare-cellbe-gpu-and-fpga/

I am interested in your opinions on GPU versus Cell processor.

[Ibrahim]

nVidia GPU, huh? I'm sure a lot of 8800 and 9x00 owners will be interested in that.

[John]

Congrats on crossing the 2 petaFLOPS barrier: http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats
(and sustaining it)

[Brad]

It appears one of your servers is currently down, just fyi. If you knew this already, please disregard, but there was no blog post about it.

[Stephen Dewey]

Seems to be back up now, at least for SMP work.

[Peter]

Since 5 May no more updates...

[Stephen Dewey]

@Peter,
Sometimes progress takes a bit of time and patience :).