Researchers from the University of Warwick’s Performance Computing and Visualization Department and Oxford University’s eResearch Centre have put together a study: should we install a GPGPU-based system or a more traditional IMB Blue Gene-like supercomputer? The team’s research will present their work at the 1st International Workshop on Performance Modeling, Benchmarking and Simulation of High Performance Computing Systems at the SC10 conference in New Orleans. The Khronos Group will be at Booth # 1132 at SC10.

Currently there are several ways to feed data to the GPU no matter of what API we use and what type of application we develop. In case of OpenGL we have uniform buffers, texture buffers, texture images, etc. The same is true for OpenCL and other compute APIs that even provide more fine-grained memory management taking advantage of the local data store (LDS) available on today’s hardware. In this article I’ll present the memory access performance characteristics of AMD’s Evergreen-class GPUs focusing on what this all means from OpenGL point of view. While most of the data is about the HD5870, the general principles and relative performance characteristics are valid for other GPUs, including ones from other vendors.

CopperLicht is a JavaScript 3D engine for creating games and 3d applications in the webbrowser. It uses the WebGL canvas supported by modern browsers and is able to render hardware accelerated 3d graphics without any plugins. This update sees a few bug fixes as well as having its own name space defined in JS to avoid conflicts with other libraries, such as jQuery.