Abstract

TRUJILLO, CARLOS  and  GARCIA-SUCERQUIA, JORGE. GRAPHICS PROCESSING UNITS: MORE THAN THE PATHWAY TO REALISTIC VIDEO-GAMES. Dyna rev.fac.nac.minas [online]. 2011, vol.78, n.168, pp.164-172. ISSN 0012-7353.

The huge video games market has propelled the development of hardware and software focused on making the game environment more realistic. Among such developments are graphics processing units (GPUs). These devices are intended to alleviate the central processing unit (CPU) of the host computer from the computation that creates "life" for video games. The GPUs reach this goal with the use of multiple computation cores operating on a parallel architecture. Such features have made the GPUs attractive for more than the development of video games. In this paper, a brief description of the features of compute unified device architecture (CUDAT), a GPU parallel computing architecture, is presented. The application of GPUs on the numerical reconstruction of holograms from a digital in-line holographic microscope is shown. Upon the completion of this experiment, we reached an 11-fold acceleration with respect to the same calculation done on a typical CPU.

Keywords : graphics processing units; parallel programming; CUDAT; single instruction multiple data (SIMD); processing thread; diffraction integrals; numerical hologram reconstruction.

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