| | 23 | The purpose of my research is to examine the performance of graphic processing unit (GPU) with a numerical algorithm for particle simulations. Specifically, I adopt the Octree method that requires many branch instructions. In general, GPU is intrinsically not good at dealing with branch instructions. I have implemented the Octree method in single and double precision on Cypress GPU. With the GPU, the peak performance of single precision operations is five times better than that of double precision. Although it was expected that the performance of the Octree method with double precision is much slower, I found that it is not the case. On GPU, I found that the performance of the Octree method is constrained by not the computing power of the GPU but the performance penalty due to branch instructions. |
