GENERALPURPOSE GRAPHICS PROCESSOR ARCHITECTURES

Originally developed to support video games graphics processor units GPUs are now increasingly used for generalpurpose nongraphics applications ranging from machine learning to mining of cryptographic currencies GPUs can achieve improved performance and efficiency versus central processing units CPUs by dedicating a larger fraction of hardware resources to computation In addition their generalpurpose programmability makes contemporary GPUs appealing to software developers in comparison to domainspecific accelerators This book provides an introduction to those interested in studying the architecture of GPUs that support generalpurpose computing It collects together information currently only found among a wide range of disparate sources The authors led development of the GPGPUSim simulator widely used in academic research on GPU architectures The first chapter of this book describes the basic hardware structure of GPUs and provides a brief overview of their history Chapter 2 provides a summary of GPU programming models relevant to the rest of the book Chapter 3 explores the architecture of GPU compute cores Chapter 4 explores the architecture of the GPU memory system After describing the architecture of existing systems Chapters refch03 and refch04 provide an overview of related research Chapter 5 summarizes crosscutting research impacting both the compute core and memory system This book should provide a valuable resource for those wishing to understand the architecture of graphics processor units GPUs used for acceleration of generalpurpose applications and to those who want to obtain an introduction to the rapidly growing body of research exploring how to improve the architecture of these GPUs