[Colloquium] Suresh Venkatasubramanian's talk on 11/19/03

[Margery Ishmael]

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DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE - TALK

Wednesday, November 19, 2003 at 2:30 p.m. in Ryerson 251

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Speaker: SURESH VENKATASUBRAMANIAN, AT&T Labs-Research

Title:  The Graphics Card As A Stream Computer

Abstract:
Massive data sets have radically changed our understanding of how to
design efficient algorithms; the streaming paradigm, whether it in terms
of number of passes of an external memory algorithm, or the single pass
and limited memory of a stream algorithm, appears to be the dominant
method for coping with large data.

A very different kind of massive computation has had the same effect at
the level of the CPU. The most prominent example is that of the
computations performed by a graphics card. The operations themselves are
very simple, and require very little memory, but require the ability to
perform many computations extremely fast and in parallel to whatever
degree possible. What has resulted is a stream processor that is highly
optimized for stream computations. An intriguing side effect of this is
the growing use of a graphics card as a general purpose stream  
processing
engine. In an ever-increasing array of applications, researchers are
discovering that performing a computation on a graphics card is far  
faster
than performing it on a CPU, and so are using a GPU as a stream
co-processor.

In this talk, I will sketch out the main strands of what is a growing
multi-disciplinary effort, and talk about some of the main challenges
involved in creating a computational framework based on such "stream
processors". I will also discuss some examples of computations that can
currently be performed efficiently using graphics acceleration.

This talk will assume very little knowledge of graphics cards and their
working.

Web: http://www.research.att.com/~suresh/

HOST: Anne Rogers

*Refreshments will follow the talk in Ryerson 255*

People in need of assistance should call 773-834-8977 in advance.