by Dr. Vincent Natoli, President and Founder, Stone Ridge Technology
It’s been almost three years since GPU computing broke into the mainstream of HPC with the introduction of NVIDIA’s CUDA API in September 2007. Adoption of the technology since then has proceeded at a surprisingly strong and steady pace. Many organizations that began with small pilot projects a year or two ago have moved on to enterprise deployment, and GPU accelerated machines are now represented on the TOP500 list starting at position two. The relatively-rapid adoption of CUDA by a community not known for the rapid adoption of much of anything is a noteworthy signal. Contrary to the accepted wisdom that GPU computing is more difficult, I believe its success thus far signals that it is no more complicated than good CPU programming. Further, it more clearly and succinctly expresses the parallelism of a large class of problems leading to code that is easier to maintain, more scalable and better positioned to map to future many-core architectures.

The continued growth of CUDA contrasts sharply with the graveyard of abandoned languages introduced to the HPC market over the last 20 to 25 years. Its success can largely be attributed to i) support from a major corporate backer as opposed to a consortium, ii) the maturity of its compilers iii) adherence to a C syntax easily recognized by developers and iv) a more ephemeral feature that can best be described as elegance or simplicity. Physicists and Mathematicians, often use the word “elegant” as a high compliment to describe particularly appealing solutions or equations that neatly represent complex physical phenomena; where the language of mathematics succinctly and…well…elegantly describes and captures symmetry and physics. CUDA is an elegant solution to the problem of representing parallelism in algorithms, not all algorithms, but enough to matter. It seems to resonate in some way with the way we think and code, allowing an easier more natural expression of parallelism beyond the task-level.

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