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The Development And Development Of The Graphical Processing Unit

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This paper is based on CUDA, a parallel computing platform model, which utilizes the resources of the Graphical Processing Unit (GPU), increasing the computing performance of our system, hence creating a robust parallel computing unit. In this paper, we will be introducing a brief history on CUDA, it’s execution flow and it’s architecture to handle processor intensive tasks. We will also be highlighting some of it’s real life applications and the difference in performance as compared of the only CPU based architectures. Also, since most of the CUDA applications are written in C/C++, we will also be exploring how CUDA provides the programmable interface in such languages as well. Finally, we will be including the current research activities …show more content…

So, in 2007, NVIDIA released CUDA, which provided the parallel architecture, to support the usage of the GPUs. It was designed to work with programming languages such as C/C++ or Fortran and this really helped specialists in parallel programming to use CUDA, rather than to learn other advanced skills in GPU programming[10] . The model for GPU computing is to use a CPU and GPU together in a heterogeneous co-processing computing model[3]. The framework is designed such that the sequential part of the application runs on the CPU and the computationally-intensive part is accelerated by the GPU. From the user’s point of view, the application is faster because it is using the better performance of the GPU to improve its own performance.  Figure1: Core comparison between CPU and GPU 3. Architecture Since GPUs have large number of resources with hundreds of cores and thousands of threads to be utilized and have very high number of arithmetic and logical units. Hence it provides a huge parallel architectural framework to work with.  Here is a block diagram that generally describes CUDAs architecture. Figure 2: Block diagram for CUDA Architecture[4] Basic Units of CUDA Figure 2 showed the top level block diagram of the overall architecture of CUDA. Now, exploring more on to the details, we will be discussing about the basic units of CUDA.  Figure 3 : CUDA supported GPU structure [11] The architecture

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