Webinar 2013 Why Would I Use GPUs?

GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) can provide a significant speedup for certain types of scientific computations. This talk will discuss which programs can benefit from this speedup, and how in certain cases it can be obtained without much effort using already existing packages and libraries. Simulation packages already accelerated for the GPU will be discussed, with focus on NAMD molecular dynamics package as a useful example. The use of GPU-enabled numerical libraries useful for common problems will be discussed. The use of these techniques will be demonstrated with example runs on SHARCNET’s new GPU cluster. While not the focus of this talk, a brief overview of available programming approaches for GPUs will be also provided.