[Aspuru-Guzik group list] Fwd: Intel ISPC

Alán Aspuru-Guzik | Associate Professor Harvard University | Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology 12 Oxford Street, Room M113 | Cambridge, MA 02138 (617)-384-8188 | http://aspuru.chem.harvard.edu | http://about.me/aspuru ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Hanspeter Pfister &lt;pfister(a)seas.harvard.edu&gt; Date: Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 11:14 AM Subject: Intel ISPC To: scigpu(a)googlegroups.com, CDI Grant PI Private Discussion < seas-gpu-cdi(a)seas.harvard.edu&gt;gt;, gv &lt;gv(a)seas.harvard.edu&gt; Cc: Matt Pharr &lt;matt.pharr(a)intel.com&gt; Here is an interesting presentation by Matt Pharr about Intel's new ispc compiler. Matt has offered to help anyone out with getting started, answering questions, etc. You can reach him at &lt;matt.pharr(a)intel.com&gt; - HP spc: A Compiler for SPMD on the CPU Today’s CPUs provide significant amounts of performance through both multi-core parallelism and through SIMD parallelism in the vector unit of each core. Server CPUs may have as many as 8-10 cores, each of which with 8-wide AVX vector units. Hundreds of gigaflops of performance are available from these processors, if their full computational capacity can be brought to bear. Unfortunately, compilers and programming models to program CPUs haven’t kept up with hardware changes. Serial C/C++ code on a modern CPU will run at only 1/64th-1/80th of the CPU’s potential performance, and even multi-threaded code generally only runs at 1/8th of the CPU’s potential performance due to poor vector unit utilization. In this talk, I will discuss ispc, the Intel SPMD Program Compiler. (The SPMD model (Single Program, Multiple Data) is the one that underlies GPU programming models like Compute Shader and CUDA.) The ispc compiler compiles a C-based language to highly efficient vector code; it’s not unusual for it to provide speedups of over 4x on complex workloads due to highly efficient vector unit utilization. Coupled with multi-threading, it provides a programming model that can efficiently fill the CPU with computation while remaining similar enough to C that it’s easy for programmers to adopt. ispc has been released in open-source form under a BSD license and is available from http://ispc.github.com.