A Performance Study of General-Purpose Applications on Graphics Processors Using CUDA

Graphics Processors Unit (GPUs) provide a vast number of simple, data-parallel, deeply multithreaded cores and high memory bandwidths. GPU architectures are becoming increasingly programmable, offering the potential for dramatic speedups for a variety of general purpose applications compared to contemporary general-purpose processors (CPUs). This paper uses NVIDIA's C-like CUDA language and an engineering sample of their recently introduced GTX 260 GPU to explore the effectiveness of GPUs for a variety of application types, and describes some specific coding idioms that improve their performance on the GPU. GPU performance is compared to both single-core and multicore CPU performance, with multicore CPU implementations written using OpenMP.