[GRASS-dev] GRASS and GPGPU

[Dylan Beaudette]

On Sunday 02 March 2008 09:55:17 am Dylan Beaudette wrote:
> On Sunday 02 March 2008 02:41:07 am Maciej Sieczka wrote:
> > Dylan Beaudette pisze:
> > > Some starters:
> >
> > Also look at Glynn's comments not so long time ago:
> >
> > http://www.nabble.com/forum/ViewPost.jtp?post=15573024&framed=y
> >
> > Maciek
>
> Thanks for the reminder Maciek.
>
> However, (although I am not a GPU programmer) it looks like the concept of
> stream programming might fit into the GRASS approach of using simple
> formulations over optimized ones-- and here is why:
>
> many raster operations use constructs like the following:
>
> for x in rows:
> 	for y in cols:
> 		get_cell_value(x,y,)
> 		do_something(x,y, value)
> 	end
> end
>
> Based on my reading of the GPGPU documents it appears that it is possible
> to give the (libSh/Brook) library the do_something(x, y, value) function
> (called a kernel in stream processing) and the GPU will limplicitly perform
> the loop in parallel.
>
> If the functionality used in the inner-most loop can be reduced to simple
> operations, it shouldn't be too hard to "drop-in" GPGPU extensions.
>

Some more findings:

1. the Brook stream language relies on NVIDIA's Cg Compiler, which may not 
work with anything but the latest video cards / drivers.

2. NVIDIA's CUDA SDK: this relies on very recent cards / drivers, and the 
license agreement is a little vague. Also- code running on GPU's that are 
used for display can only run for 5 seconds. Therefore real code running on 
the GPU would require a secondary dedicated GPU that is not being used to 
display anything.

3. libSh: this appears the be the most flexible/open implementation of GPGPU, 
such that many NVIDIA/ATI cards are supported. It is a C++ extension, so 
there is a deviation from the ANSI C standards used in GRASS.

I was able to compile libSh from their SVN source, after installing the 
'freeglut3-dev' package (Debian/Unstable). The example files seem to compile 
fine, although I cannot test them until I am back in my office. libSh and the 
examples *seem* to be able to use my 4-yr old video card (GeForce FX 
5600XT)-- so many of the cards in circulation should be supported by now.

The examples distributed with libSh are writted around standard GPU type 
concepts -- streams of particles etc. There is a good page [1] which 
describes the more general concept of implementing stream processing with 
libSh. 

1 .http://libsh.org/wiki/index.php/How_Sh_Works

Getting to the limit of my C++ knowledge, so I have not been able to create a 
simple test case yet. There appears to be extensive documentation on the 
available matrix/geometry/trig methods, but they are in such small snippets 
that it would take someone with more experience to stitch them into a 
complete program.

I wonder if Soren's groundwater flow routines could benefit from what libSh 
has to offer?

Dylan


-- 
Dylan Beaudette
Soil Resource Laboratory
http://casoilresource.lawr.ucdavis.edu/
University of California at Davis
530.754.7341