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Contact: Bruce Conley
Associate Director of College Relations
Phone: (605) 274-5526
Fax: (605) 274-4903
www.augie.edu
May 15, 2007
SIOUX FALLS - Continuing his interest in utilizing multiple processors for high performance computing, David Huebner (Fargo, ND) and fellow computer science student Alex Stommes (Sioux Falls) were named on a NASA Space Grant Program Initiation Grant awarded to Dr. Dan Swets in Augustana’s computer science department.
Rather than using the dedicated chemistry rack mounted cluster computer, this summer Huebner and Stommes will investigate the use of the graphics card processor (GPU) as an auxiliary processor to assist the main CPU on a single general-purpose, off-the-shelf PC.
This project builds on work done at the University of North Carolina showing specialized GPUs surpassing the latest CPU-based systems by two to five times in a wide variety of tasks 1. A Stanford University study shows performance gains of 20 to 40 times over CPUs: An array of 536 GPUs produced 35 trillion calculations per second compared to 21 trillion calculations per second from 17,485 CPUs. 2.
This summer project will investigate the nature of parallel processing utilizing both of these processing powerhouses. The specific application used to test the utility of this approach will be the parallelization of seasonality metrics code to produce phonological data from NASA satellite (MODIS) images3. These images are massive in size, and require parallel processing for real-time processing; this project seeks to achieve this parallel processing capability with a commodity off-the-shelf PC.