Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “NVIDIA”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 19 records

Optimization of a Solver for Computational Materials and Structures Problems on NVIDIA Volta and AMD Instinct GPUs

The Scalable Implementation of Finite Elements by NASA (ScIFEN) is a software package developed to solve complex computational materials and structures problems using the finite element method (FEM). In this paper, we describe optimization techniques to speed up the linear solver computation that occurs within the ScIFEN application. We consider GPUs from two different vendors, NVIDIA and AMD as our target platforms for optimization and highlight differences in performance and optimization techniques. The NVIDIA GPU Volta V100 is used in the Summit system deployed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the new exascale system, Frontier, will be using AMD Radeon Instinct GPU. We evaluated the performance of various optimization techniques on test matrices, ranging in size from100K to 4M, that are representative of ScIFEN applications. The linear solver computation is memory-bound on both GPUs. Our experiments show that on the NVIDIA GPU we obtained up to79%of the theoretical peak bandwidth, while the AMD GPU achieved 59%. Overall, the NVIDIA V100 GPU outperforms the AMD MI 25 GPU1. We observed an overall speedup of up to37X on an NVIDIA V100 compared to an Intel Skylake 12-coremachine. The solver for a 4M degree of freedom system took under 2.5 seconds.

Mohammad Zubair↗

Improvements to a Batch Pentadiagonal Solver on NVIDIA GPUs

This poster presents the recent work in OVERFLOW to port the batched pentadiagonal solver to NVIDIA GPUs. There are five pentadiagonal systems for each pencil in the grid but three of these systems share the same LHS. Our first simple approach for porting the pentadiagonal solver to the GPUs was to take advantage of the shared LHS by assigning three threads to the three LHS of each pencil. We demonstrated that this custom solver was 92% faster than the NVIDIA batched pentadiagonal library implementation on a V100 GPU due to the lower memory bandwidth requirements. The second approach treated each pentadiagonal system as a 2x2 block tridiagonal system and used a variant of the parallel cyclic reduction algorithm to solve the problem. One benefit of this approach is that it does not require interleaving the data between each system. We demonstrated that this algorithm is 2.18x faster than the NVIDIA library implementation for the same amount of work. If we take advantage of our shared LHS, this approach is 2.58x faster than the library implementation on a V100 GPU.

GPU Programming↗

Proton Testing of nVidia Jetson TX2

Single-Event Effects (SEE) testing was conducted on the nVidia Jetson TX2 System on Chip (SOC). Testing was conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital's (MGH) Francis H. Burr Proton Therapy Center on June 2nd, 2019.

System on Chip (SOC)↗

Optimization of Selected Remote Sensing Algorithms for Embedded NVIDIA Kepler GPU Architecture

This paper evaluates the potential of embedded Graphic Processing Units in the Nvidias Tegra K1 for onboard processing. The performance is compared to a general purpose multi-core CPU and full fledge GPU accelerator. This study uses two algorithms: Wavelet Spectral Dimension Reduction of Hyperspectral Imagery and Automated Cloud-Cover Assessment (ACCA) Algorithm. Tegra K1 achieved 51 for ACCA algorithm and 20 for the dimension reduction algorithm, as compared to the performance of the high-end 8-core server Intel Xeon CPU with 13.5 times higher power consumption.

Riha, Lubomir↗

Proton Testing of nVidia Jetson TX1

Single-Event Effects (SEE) testing was conducted on the nVidia Jetson TX1 System on Chip (SOC); herein referred to as device under test (DUT). Testing was conducted at Massachusetts General Hospitals (MGH) Francis H. Burr Proton Therapy Center on October 16th, 2016 using 200MeV protons. This testing trip was purposed to provide a baseline assessment of the radiation susceptibility of the DUT as no previous testing had been conducted on this component.

Proton testing↗

Proton Testing of nVidia GTX 1050 GPU

Single-Event Effects (SEE) testing was conducted on the nVidia GTX 1050 Graphics Processor Unit (GPU); herein referred to as device under test (DUT). Testing was conducted at Massachusetts General Hospitals (MGH) Francis H. Burr Proton Therapy Center on April 9th, 2017 using 200-MeV protons. This testing trip was purposed to provide a baseline assessment of the radiation susceptibility of the DUT as no previous testing had been conducted on this component.

Proton testing↗

Optimization of Selected Remote Sensing Algorithms for Embedded NVIDIA Kepler GPU Architecture

This paper evaluates the potential of embedded Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) in Nvidia's Tegra K1 (based on Kepler (TM) hardware) for onboard processing. The performance is compared to a general purpose multi-core CPU (Central Processing Unit) and a fully-fledged GPU accelerator. This study uses two algorithms: Wavelet Spectral Dimension Reduction of Hyperspectral Imagery and Automated Cloud-Cover Assessment (ACCA) Algorithm. Tegra K1 achieved 51 for the ACCA algorithm and 20 for the dimension reduction algorithm, as compared to the performance of the high-end 8-core server Intel Xeon CPU with 13.5 times higher power consumption.

data reduction↗

Proton Testing of nVidia GTX 1050 GPU, Part 2

Single-Event Effects (SEE) testing was conducted on the nVidia GTX 1050 Graphics Processor Unit (GPU); herein referred to as device under test (DUT). Testing was conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital's (MGH) Francis H. Burr Proton Therapy Center on April 28th, 2018 using 200-MeV protons. This testing trip was purposed to provide additional radiation susceptibility data from payloads compiled in Q3FY18. While not all radiation-induced errors are critical, the effects on the application need to be considered. More so, failure of the device and an inability to reset itself should be considered detrimental to the application. Radiation effects on electronic components are a significant reliability issue for systems intended for space.

Single-Event Effects (SEE)↗

Accelerated Simulation of Air Pollution Using NVIDIA RAPIDS

Atmospheric chemistry models are a central tool to study and forecast the impact of air pollution on the environment, vegetation, and human health. However, the numerical simulation of chemical kinetics is computationally expensive due to the stiffness of the system of ordinary differential equations that describes atmospheric chemistry. Here we present an alternative approach to the computation of atmospheric chemistry based on machine learning. Our training data set is produced using the NASA Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS) model with GEOS-Chem chemistry, run on the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) Discover supercomputing cluster on 384 Intel Xeon Haswell cores. This model spends more than 50% of total run time on solving atmospheric chemistry. The data set contains as input features the air pollution concentrations before solving the differential equations, together with some key physical parameters such as temperature and sun intensity. As target variables we define the air pollution concentrations after solving the differential equations. Using Dask-cuDF and Dask-XGBoost on the NVIDIA RAPIDS platform on 8 Tesla V100 GPUs, we generate from this training set gradient boosted decision tree models that can reproduce the simulation of chemical kinetics. We do this on the NCCS Advanced Data Analytics Platform (ADAPT) science cloud environment. Our application takes full advantage of recent advances in Dask-XGBoost, such as multi-node and multi-GPU scaling for distributed training with large data sets. The increase in training data size enabled by this is critical to capture the full range of chemical environments encountered across the globe and all annual seasons.The boosted tree models offer good predictability and show many of the features of the full chemistry reference simulation. Further improvements can be achieved through mass balance considerations and by accounting for error correlations. We incorporate the boosted tree models into the GEOS reference model using XGBoost's C API. This enables a seamless integration of the GPU trained models into GEOS-Chem, which is written in Fortran and optimized for use in a massively parallel CPU environment. We show the benefits of this approach and discuss the potential speedup of this machine learning accelerated atmospheric chemistry model.

Keller, Christoph A.↗

Accelerated Adaptive MGS Phase Retrieval

The Modified Gerchberg-Saxton (MGS) algorithm is an image-based wavefront-sensing method that can turn any science instrument focal plane into a wavefront sensor. MGS characterizes optical systems by estimating the wavefront errors in the exit pupil using only intensity images of a star or other point source of light. This innovative implementation of MGS significantly accelerates the MGS phase retrieval algorithm by using stream-processing hardware on conventional graphics cards. Stream processing is a relatively new, yet powerful, paradigm to allow parallel processing of certain applications that apply single instructions to multiple data (SIMD). These stream processors are designed specifically to support large-scale parallel computing on a single graphics chip. Computationally intensive algorithms, such as the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), are particularly well suited for this computing environment. This high-speed version of MGS exploits commercially available hardware to accomplish the same objective in a fraction of the original time. The exploit involves performing matrix calculations in nVidia graphic cards. The graphical processor unit (GPU) is hardware that is specialized for computationally intensive, highly parallel computation. From the software perspective, a parallel programming model is used, called CUDA, to transparently scale multicore parallelism in hardware. This technology gives computationally intensive applications access to the processing power of the nVidia GPUs through a C/C++ programming interface. The AAMGS (Accelerated Adaptive MGS) software takes advantage of these advanced technologies, to accelerate the optical phase error characterization. With a single PC that contains four nVidia GTX-280 graphic cards, the new implementation can process four images simultaneously to produce a JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) wavefront measurement 60 times faster than the previous code.

Lam, Raymond K.↗

GPU Lossless Hyperspectral Data Compression System for Space Applications

On-board lossless hyperspectral data compression reduces data volume in order to meet NASA and DoD limited downlink capabilities. At JPL, a novel, adaptive and predictive technique for lossless compression of hyperspectral data, named the Fast Lossless (FL) algorithm, was recently developed. This technique uses an adaptive filtering method and achieves state-of-the-art performance in both compression effectiveness and low complexity. Because of its outstanding performance and suitability for real-time onboard hardware implementation, the FL compressor is being formalized as the emerging CCSDS Standard for Lossless Multispectral & Hyperspectral image compression. The FL compressor is well-suited for parallel hardware implementation. A GPU hardware implementation was developed for FL targeting the current state-of-the-art GPUs from NVIDIA(Trademark). The GPU implementation on a NVIDIA(Trademark) GeForce(Trademark) GTX 580 achieves a throughput performance of 583.08 Mbits/sec (44.85 MSamples/sec) and an acceleration of at least 6 times a software implementation running on a 3.47 GHz single core Intel(Trademark) Xeon(Trademark) processor. This paper describes the design and implementation of the FL algorithm on the GPU. The massively parallel implementation will provide in the future a fast and practical real-time solution for airborne and space applications.

Graphic Processor Units↗

Standardizing GPU Radiation Test Approaches

While some Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) are discrete components (i.e.GTX1050), others take the form of an IP block or embedded engine within a System on Chip (SoC) device such as the Qualcomm Snapdragon"TM" 820 which contains a Qualcomm Adreno"TM" 530 GPU. Within this device are various functional blocks which can be exercised with software payloads. NVidia's Jetson"TM" TX1 SoC is provided on a System on Module (SOM). Within it are Central Processing Unit (CPU) cores and an nVidia GPU which can be accessed similarly to a discrete GPU coprocessor. While the packaging is different, each one of these GPUs needs to be tested using the same standardized code.

Single Event Effects (SEE)↗

Enabling Execution of a Legacy CFD Mini Application on Accelerators Using OpenMP

We describe the process and outcome of our efforts to port a legacy Fortran benchmark code to heterogeneous GPU-accelerated computing architectures using OpenMP. The benchmark code is one of the multi-zone NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB-MZ) called SP-MZ. This “mini-app” mimics the computation and data movement that is found in popular legacy and modern implicit computational fluid dynamics (CFD)solvers. Our objective was to examine how efficiently legacy Fortran codes can be ported to accelerators by leveraging OpenMP directives. We describe the development and optimization process and demonstrate the performance impact of various code modifications. We show select profiling results from the Nvidia nvvp profiler to help others diagnose and overcome performance issues in their own applications. We present results for two compute systems endowed with Nvidia V100 accelerators.

Ioannis Nompelis↗

A Multi-Architecture Approach for Implicit Computational Fluid Dynamics on Unstructured Grids

High-performance computing (HPC) architectures are trending toward manycore paradigms such as graphics processing units (GPUs). Approximately half of the top 100 publicly disclosed supercomputers in the world utilize GPU accelerators for performance. This is in contrast to a decade ago, where there were only a few such machines in the top 100. It is not currently possible to compile and run legacy central processing unit (CPU) software efficiently on GPUs without significant refactoring. Though a number of frameworks offering performance portability exist, none offer a standardized specification that is supported by all major hardware vendors. Additionally, experiences show that obtaining a high percentage of peak performance often requires architecture-specific code. This work details a pragmatic multi-architecture computational fluid dynamics library focused on aerospace problems across the speed range from low subsonic to hypersonic flows involving thermochemical nonequilibrium. A thin abstraction layer above NVIDIA CUDA C++ is utilized, which enables primarily single-source software currently capable of running efficiently on multicore CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs, AMD GPUs, and Intel GPUs. Results on various problems of interest across the speed range are presented and performance is compared between various architectures.

GPU↗

A Multi-Architecture Approach for Implicit Computational Fluid Dynamics on Unstructured Grids

High-performance computing (HPC) architectures are trending toward manycore paradigms such as graphics processing units (GPUs). Approximately half of the top 100 publicly disclosed supercomputers in the world utilize GPU accelerators for performance. This is in contrast to a decade ago, where there were only a few such machines in the top 100. It is not currently possible to compile and run legacy central processing unit (CPU) software efficiently on GPUs without significant refactoring. Though a number of frameworks offering performance portability exist, none offer a standardized specification that is supported by all major hardware vendors. Additionally, experiences show that obtaining a high percentage of peak performance often requires architecture-specific code. This work details a pragmatic multi-architecture computational fluid dynamics library focused on aerospace problems across the speed range from low subsonic to hypersonic flows involving thermochemical nonequilibrium. A thin abstraction layer above NVIDIA CUDA C++ is utilized, which enables primarily single-source software currently capable of running efficiently on multicore CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs, AMD GPUs, and Intel GPUs. Results on various problems of interest across the speed range are presented and performance is compared between various architectures.

GPU↗

GPU Accelerated Vector Median Filter

Noise reduction is an important step for most image processing tasks. For three channel color images, a widely used technique is vector median filter in which color values of pixels are treated as 3-component vectors. Vector median filters are computationally expensive; for a window size of n x n, each of the n(sup 2) vectors has to be compared with other n(sup 2) - 1 vectors in distances. General purpose computation on graphics processing units (GPUs) is the paradigm of utilizing high-performance many-core GPU architectures for computation tasks that are normally handled by CPUs. In this work. NVIDIA's Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) paradigm is used to accelerate vector median filtering. which has to the best of our knowledge never been done before. The performance of GPU accelerated vector median filter is compared to that of the CPU and MPI-based versions for different image and window sizes, Initial findings of the study showed 100x improvement of performance of vector median filter implementation on GPUs over CPU implementations and further speed-up is expected after more extensive optimizations of the GPU algorithm .

Aras, Rifat↗

Enhanced Graphics for Extended Scale Range

Enhanced Graphics for Extended Scale Range is a computer program for rendering fly-through views of scene models that include visible objects differing in size by large orders of magnitude. An example would be a scene showing a person in a park at night with the moon, stars, and galaxies in the background sky. Prior graphical computer programs exhibit arithmetic and other anomalies when rendering scenes containing objects that differ enormously in scale and distance from the viewer. The present program dynamically repartitions distance scales of objects in a scene during rendering to eliminate almost all such anomalies in a way compatible with implementation in other software and in hardware accelerators. By assigning depth ranges correspond ing to rendering precision requirements, either automatically or under program control, this program spaces out object scales to match the precision requirements of the rendering arithmetic. This action includes an intelligent partition of the depth buffer ranges to avoid known anomalies from this source. The program is written in C++, using OpenGL, GLUT, and GLUI standard libraries, and nVidia GEForce Vertex Shader extensions. The program has been shown to work on several computers running UNIX and Windows operating systems.

Hanson, Andrew J.↗