"A Closer Look at GPUs" Published in October CACM

An updated version of Mike Houston and I's ACM Queue article "GPUs: A Closer Look" was republished in the October 2008 issue of Communications of the ACM as "A Closer Look at GPUs" (also available on my web page). The text has been improved slightly from the original version, and various references to GPUs on the market have been updated to reference current product lines. A historical note to readers: this work was the basis for my talk at the Beyond Programmable Shading class at SIGGRAPH08. It undergoes constant improvement and I personally feel that as the most recent iteration, the SIGGRAPH talk constitutes the most evolved and finely tuned description of GPU architecture concepts. However, the article does go beyond the scope of the talk to describe a precise, but simple, model of the modern real-time graphics pipeline (and resulting workload) that was not presented at SIGGRAPH due to time constraints. I give much credit to Kurt Akeley, Pat Hanrahan, as well as others in the Stanford Graphics Lab, for establishing this mental model of the graphics pipeline over the past two years.

GRAMPS: A Programming Model for Graphics Pipelines (it's finally out the door)

Myself and fellow students at Stanford have been exploring the feasibility of custom graphics pipelines for the past year or two. This work has resulted in a research system called GRAMPS. GRAMPS generalizes ideas from modern graphics pipelines by permitting application programmers to create arbitrary computation graphs (not just pipelines) that contain programmable and fixed-function stages that exchange data via explicitly named queues. The GRAMPS abstractions anticipate high-throughput implementations that leverage a combination of CPU and GPU-like processing cores as well as fixed-function units.

I have recently received a number of requests asking about this work. To those interested, just last week we shipped off a final copy of our paper, entitled "GRAMPS: A Programming Model for Graphics Pipelines" to ACM TOG. If all goes well, I'm told it should be appearing in early 2009. Until then, you can find an electronic copy of the submitted draft here.