text: Parallel computing using accelerators has gained widespread research attention in the past few years. In particular, using GPUs for general purpose computing has brought forth several success stories with respect to time taken, cost, power, and other metrics. However, accelerator based computing has signifi- cantly relegated the role of CPUs in computation. As CPUs evolve and also offer matching computational resources, it is important to also include CPUs in the computation. We call this the hybrid computing model. Indeed, most computer systems of the present age offer a degree of heterogeneity and therefore such a model is quite natural. We reevaluate the claim of a recent paper by (ISCA 2010). We argue that the right question arising out of (ISCA 2010) should be how to use a CPU+GPU platform efficiently, instead of whether one should use a CPU or a GPU exclusively. To this end, we experiment with a set of 13 diverse workloads ranging from databases, image processing, sparse matrix kernels, and graphs. We experiment with two different hybrid platforms: one consisting of a 6-core Intel i7-980X CPU and an NVidia Tesla T10 GPU, and another consisting of an Intel E7400 dual core CPU with an NVidia GT520 GPU. On both these platforms, we show that hybrid solutions offer good advantage over CPU or GPU alone solutions. On both these platforms, we also show that our solutions are 90 resource efficient on average. Our work therefore suggests that hybrid computing can offer tremendous advantages at not only research-scale platforms but also the more realistic scale systems with significant performance gains and resource efficiency to the large scale user community.
  @cite_42: Recent advances in computing have led to an explosion in the amount of data being generated. Processing the ever-growing data in a timely manner has made throughput computing an important aspect for emerging applications. Our analysis of a set of important throughput computing kernels shows that there is an ample amount of parallelism in these kernels which makes them suitable for today's multi-core CPUs and GPUs. In the past few years there have been many studies claiming GPUs deliver substantial speedups (between 10X and 1000X) over multi-core CPUs on these kernels. To understand where such large performance difference comes from, we perform a rigorous performance analysis and find that after applying optimizations appropriate for both CPUs and GPUs the performance gap between an Nvidia GTX280 processor and the Intel Core i7-960 processor narrows to only 2.5x on average. In this paper, we discuss optimization techniques for both CPU and GPU, analyze what architecture features contributed to performance differences between the two architectures, and recommend a set of architectural features which provide significant improvement in architectural efficiency for throughput kernels.
summary: A recent work that motivated this paper is the work of @cite_42 . In @cite_42 , argue that GPU computing can offer on average only a 3x performance advantage over a multicore CPU on a range of 14 workloads deemed important for throughput oriented applications. Some of our workloads overlap theirs @cite_42 . Their paper also generated a wide amount of debate on the applicability and limitations of GPU computing. Our view however is that it is not a question of whether GPUs can outperform CPUs or vice-versa, but rather what can be achieved when GPUs and CPUs join forces in a viable hybrid computing platform. Further, for the workloads that are included also in @cite_42 , we provided our own GPU and CPU implementations. In workloads such as , we use novel ideas such as precomputing the transcendentals on the GPU for a pure GPU implementation that improve the performance beyond what is reported in @cite_42 .