100x Speedups, Are They Real?

100x speedups, are they real? A handful of the 30+ attendees at June 6 meetup meeting of the HPC & GPU Supercomputing Group of Silicon Valley put their hands up while most were skeptical.

“How many machines are at your disposal?”
“Are we talking about single-thread, multi-thread, or what?”
“Is this for any application of application specific?”

Questions started coming from all directions for this topic that many have explored when faced with plethora of opportunities that multicore and manycore processors bring, which validates it is very much an ongoing debate.

For the next 50 minutes, Jike Chong, adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon, Principal Application Architect at Parasians, and the organizer of this HPC/GPU meetup group, brought forth five key questions to shed some light on this discussion:

- What does 100x speedup mean?
- Who is concerned about 100x speedup?
- Where do 100x speedups come from?
- When is the comparison useful?
- How can I get the speedup?

His talk focused on the critical role that the application developers play in the changing landscape of the semiconductor industry. It distinguished the application developers’ concerns with the concerns of other important players in the field, such as the architecture researchers.

Jike introduced the audience to the past and present practices of industry practitioners and researchers to work towards answering the question about obtaining speedups across processors and platforms. He then used an example to illustrate the levels of optimizations that are possible for developing efficient applications on modern parallel computing platforms.

With this background in place, Jike discussed when and how speedups are useful for pioneer industry practitioners working on parallel application development, as well as common pitfalls when making or interpreting such comparisons.

Finally, Jike made concrete recommendations for organizations and practitioners looking for 100x speedup for their applications as they seek to take advantage of significant speedups to make game changing technology advances, realize significant cost savings, and enable new revenue capabilities.

100x speedups, are they real? Take a look at the slides and video (segments may be available soon), and let us know what you think!

This is a glimpse of what takes place monthly at this local group that grew from zero to 150+ active members in four months.

But wait, there’s more! A short talk and a book review also showcased in the meeting: Micah Villmow, Senior Compiler Engineer at AMD lead the group through AMD’s GPU computing timeline, how performance doubles or almost doubles with each generation from graphics to compute, and we could see when industry experts really started viewing HW as compute machine rather than a graphics machine. Ankit Gupta from NVIDIA shared a review of chapter 32 of GPU Computing Gems, volume 1: Real-Time Speed-Limit-Sign Recognition on an Embedded System Using a GPU.

While the slides of this action-packed meeting are accessible, those who attend in person have the benefit to learn and challenge each other in an intimate and interactive setting. The HPC & GPU Meetup “cluster” has now grown to include ten US-based groups, with more than 600 members, with the initiator Andrew Sheppard on a mission to start more!

Are there practices that work well for you in engaging with GPU developers and practitioners? Talk to any of our organizers! It’s interesting times for HPC and GPU supercomputing, so join a local group or start your own!

**Footnote: The “100x speedup, is it real?” talk builds on a recently published Berkeley Paper on this topic, which the speaker co-authored.