It's my pleasure to announce the next SciGPU seminar, to be given by Peter Lu: "Orders-of-magnitude performance increases in GPU-accelerated correlation of images from the International Space Station" DATE: Monday, November 30, 2009 TIME: 12:30 PM (Pizza and drinks will be available from 12:15) LOCATION: Maxwell Dworkin, Room 319, 33 Oxford Street, Cambridge SPEAKER: Peter J. Lu, Harvard University Department of Physics ABSTRACT: We implement image correlation, a fundamental component of many real-time imaging and tracking systems, on a graphics processing unit (GPU) using NVIDIAs CUDA. We use our code to analyze images of liquid-gas phase separation in a model colloid-polymer system, photographed in the absence of gravity aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Our GPU code is 4000 times faster than simple MATLAB code performing the same calculation on a central processing unit (CPU), 130 times faster than simple C code, and 30 times faster than optimized C++ code using single-instruction, multiple data (SIMD) extensions. The speed increases from these parallel algorithms enable us to analyze images downlinked from the ISS in a rapid fashion and send feedback to astronauts on orbit while the experiments are still being run. WWW: physics.harvard.edu/~plu/ iic.harvard.edu scigpu.org