The Sputnik crisis shocked the US policy as well as the US science in 1957 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first Earth satellite. The launch of Sputnik 1 showed clearly that the US had lost its leadership in space technology. In 2002, the Computnik crisis followed when Japan introduced its Earth Simulator,… Continue reading Computenik 2.0
A few days ago, I started to gather a survey on GPU computing literature. The survey is non-exhaustive and has strong bias to computational physics applications. However, it might be useful for other GPU computing enthusiasts as well. Therefore, I publish my survey in this post. The list will be updated from time to time.… Continue reading GPU computing literature
Morgan Kaufmann Publishers have published one of the very first books on Nvidia’s popular Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) parallel computing technology, Programming Massively Parallel Processors: A Hands-on Approach, written by two experts in the field, David B. Kirk and Wen-mei W. Hwu. Kirk was Chief Scientist at Nvidia and he is currently an Nvidia… Continue reading Book review: Programming Massively Parallel Processors: A Hands-on Approach
A new version of TRNG (Tina’s Random Number Generator Library) has been released. For the new version TRNG 4.10 two additional random number distribution classes twosided_exponential_dist and truncated_normal_dist have been implemented. If you need a modern C++ random number generator library, check out TRNG 4.10.
From time to time students ask me what might be the best programming language for computational physics and numerical applications. For a long time my standard answer to this question was twofold: The language does not matter, learn C++! On the one hand, I think one should not bother to much with this issue because… Continue reading Scientific Python
Would you like to test your parallel programming skills? Then you might participate in the Intel Threading Challenge 2010 and demonstrate your skills in one of two levels of participation. Apprentice level gives programmers new to multithreading and parallelism. Master level targets developers with multithreading experience. Problem 1 of the 1st phase in Apprentice level… Continue reading Intel Threading Challenge 2010
A new version of TRNG (Tina’s Random Number Generator Library) has been released. New features of TRNG 4.9 include: A new random number distribution class hypergeometric_dist and a new random number engine class mlcg2_64 have been implemented. Performance improvements for split methods of the classes lcg64 and lcg64_shift. The computational complexity has been reduced from… Continue reading New TRNG release
For several decades, software developers (of high performance computing applications) could trust on Moore’s law. The number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years. This exponential growth allowed an ever-increasing computing power of modern CPUs. Thus, high performance computing applications became faster by just trusting… Continue reading Free lunch
The message passing interface (MPI) is a specification for an api that allows processes to communicate by exchanging messages. It is designed for high performance computing applications and is utilized on distributed memory architectures (as computer clusters) as well as on shared memory computers. The initial version of the MPI standard, MPI-1.0, was created in… Continue reading MPI reloaded
In a recent project (the numerical solution of the Dirac equation) I am working on, the computation of the fast Fourier transform (FFT) of four interwoven two-dimensional grids is the main computational task. Interwoven grids means that the memory layout of the matrices is such that data starts with the 1st element of the 1st… Continue reading Parallel FFT performance