Mapping computational concepts to GPUs

Recently, graphics processors have emerged as a powerful computational platform. A variety of encouraging results, mostly from researchers using GPUs to accelerate scientific computing and visualization applications, have shown that significant speedups can be achieved by applying GPUs to data-parallel computational problems. However, attaining these speedups requires knowledge of GPU programming and architecture.The preceding chapters have described the architecture of modern GPUs and the trends that govern their performance and design. Continuing from the concepts introduced in those chapters, in this chapter we present intuitive mappings of standard computational concepts onto the special-purpose features of GPUs. After presenting the basics, we introduce a simple GPU programming framework and demonstrate the use of the framework in a short sample program.