Brook for GPUs: stream computing on graphics hardware

In this paper, we present Brook for GPUs, a system for general-purpose computation on programmable graphics hardware. Brook extends C to include simple data-parallel constructs, enabling the use of the GPU as a streaming co-processor. We present a compiler and runtime system that abstracts and virtu...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:ACM transactions on graphics 2004-08, Vol.23 (3), p.777-786
Main Authors: Buck, Ian, Foley, Tim, Horn, Daniel, Sugerman, Jeremy, Fatahalian, Kayvon, Houston, Mike, Hanrahan, Pat
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Computer graphics
Computing methodologies
Concurrent programming languages
Distributed programming languages
General programming languages
Graphics processors
Graphics systems and interfaces
Language types
Parallel programming languages
Software and its engineering
Software notations and tools
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Summary:In this paper, we present Brook for GPUs, a system for general-purpose computation on programmable graphics hardware. Brook extends C to include simple data-parallel constructs, enabling the use of the GPU as a streaming co-processor. We present a compiler and runtime system that abstracts and virtualizes many aspects of graphics hardware. In addition, we present an analysis of the effectiveness of the GPU as a compute engine compared to the CPU, to determine when the GPU can outperform the CPU for a particular algorithm. We evaluate our system with five applications, the SAXPY and SGEMV BLAS operators, image segmentation, FFT, and ray tracing. For these applications, we demonstrate that our Brook implementations perform comparably to hand-written GPU code and up to seven times faster than their CPU counterparts.
ISSN:0730-0301
1557-7368
DOI:10.1145/1015706.1015800