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NVIDIA CUDA 4.0

Posted: Sun Aug 14, 2011 9:50 pm
by Polter
nwhitehe, thanks for your reply and explanations!



Regarding the floating points vs. integers in benchmarking -- sure, the points you're making are valid and I don't dispute them. The thing is, however, that all that makes floating points harder also makes it more interesting -- esp. double precision seems to have been a challenge for GPUs so far, but that's precisely what's most useful for quant finance. Hence, from the practical point of view, it'd be interesting to see the comparison :-)



In my experience, when using C for CUDA a lot of low-level detail mattered, like coalesced memory access and choosing whether to use global, local, shared, constant or texture memory (it had quite a very significant impact on performance for my PDE solver application) -- have those issues become easier to manage / more automatized with CUDA 4.0?



P.S. really like your website, nice exposition!




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MadMax, some curiosities regarding the performance of std::accumulate are also related to it using operator+ (not operator+=) and issues with trying to optimize it with move semantics (from a compiler point of view) keeping standard-compliance; discussion here: http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/libstdc++/2011-01/msg00015.html

I solely mention those as "curiosities", since I wouldn't expect them to have an impact on "small" data structures (like a built-in double) (and the example above considers std::string), but it might still be of interest.