# Using GPUs to Accelerate Epidemic Forecasting

Originally trained as a veterinary surgeon, Chris Jewell, a Senior Lecturer in Epidemiology at Lancaster Medical School in the UK became interested in epidemics through his experience working on the foot and mouth disease outbreak in the UK in 2001. His work so far has been on livestock epidemics such as foot and mouth disease, theileriosis, and avian influenza with government organizations in the UK, New Zealand, Australia, and the US. Recently, he has refocused his efforts into the human field where populations and epidemics tend to be larger and therefore need more computing grunt.

Epidemic forecasting centers around Bayesian inference on dynamical models, using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) as the model fitting algorithm. As part of this algorithm Chris has had to calculate a statistical likelihood function which itself involves a large sum over pairs of infected and susceptible individuals. He is currently using CUDA technology to accelerate this calculation and enable real-time inference, leading to timely forecasts for informing control decisions.

“Without CUDA technology, the MCMC is simply too slow to be of practical use during a disease outbreak,” he says. “With the 380x speedup over a single core non-vector CPU code, real-time forecasting is now a reality!”

# New Features in CUDA 7.5

Today I’m happy to announce that the CUDA Toolkit 7.5 Release Candidate is now available. The CUDA Toolkit 7.5 adds support for FP16 storage for up to 2x larger data sets and reduced memory bandwidth, cuSPARSE GEMVI routines, instruction-level profiling and more. Read on for full details.

## 16-bit Floating Point (FP16) Data

CUDA 7.5 expands support for 16-bit floating point (FP16) data storage and arithmetic, adding new `half` and `half2` datatypes and intrinsic functions for operating on them. 16-bit “half-precision” floating point types are useful in applications that can process larger datasets or gain performance by choosing to store and operate on lower-precision data. Some large neural network models, for example, may be constrained by available GPU memory; and some signal processing kernels (such as FFTs) are bound by memory bandwidth.

Many applications can benefit by storing data in half precision, and processing it in 32-bit (single) precision. At GTC 2015 in March, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced that future Pascal architecture GPUs will include full support for such “mixed precision” computation, with FP16 (half) computation at higher throughput than FP32 (single) or FP64 (double) .

With CUDA 7.5, applications can benefit by storing up to 2x larger models in GPU memory. Applications that are bottlenecked by memory bandwidth may get up to 2x speedup. And applications on Tegra X1 GPUs bottlenecked by FP32 computation may benefit from 2x faster computation on `half2` data.

CUDA 7.5 provides 3 main FP16 features: Continue reading

# Parallel Direct Solvers with cuSOLVER: Batched QR

[Note: Lung Sheng Chien from NVIDIA also contributed to this post.]

A key bottleneck for most science and engineering simulations is the solution of sparse linear systems of equations, which can account for up to 95% of total simulation time. There are two types of solvers for these systems: iterative and direct solvers.  Iterative solvers are favored for the largest systems these days (see my earlier posts about AmgX), while direct solvers are useful for smaller systems because of their accuracy and robustness.

CUDA 7 expands the capabilities of GPU-accelerated numerical computing with cuSOLVER, a powerful new suite of direct linear system solvers.   These solvers provide highly accurate and robust solutions for smaller systems, and cuSOLVER offers a way of combining many small systems into a ‘batch’ and solving all of them in parallel, which is critical for the most complex simulations today.   Combustion models, bio-chemical models and advanced high-order finite-element models all benefit directly from this new capability.  Computer vision and object detection applications need to solve many least-squares problems, so they will also benefit from cuSOLVER.

Direct solvers rely on algebraic factorization of a matrix, which breaks a hard-to-solve matrix into two or more easy-to-solve factors, and a solver routine which uses the factors and a right hand side vector and solves them one at a time to give a highly accurate solution. Figure 1 shows an example of $LDL^T$ factorization of a dense matrix.   A solver for this factorization would first solve the transpose of L part, then apply the inverse of the D (diagonal) part in parallel, then solve again with L to arrive at the final answer. The benefit of direct solvers is that (unlike iterative solvers), they always find a solution (when the factors exist; more on this later) and once a factorization is found, solutions for many right-hand sides can be performed using the factors at a much lower cost per solution. Also, for small systems, direct solvers are typically faster than iterative methods because they only pass over the matrix once.

In this post I give an overview of cuSOLVER followed by an example of using batch QR factorization for solving many sparse systems in parallel. In a followup post I will cover other aspects of cuSOLVER, including dense system solvers and the cuSOLVER refactorization API.

# ArrayFire: A Portable Open-Source Accelerated Computing Library

The ArrayFire library is a high-performance software library with a focus on portability and productivity. It supports highly tuned, GPU-accelerated algorithms using an easy-to-use API. ArrayFire wraps GPU memory into a simple “array” object, enabling developers to process vectors, matrices, and volumes on the GPU using high-level routines, without having to get involved with device kernel code.

## ArrayFire Capabilities

ArrayFire is an open-source C/C++ library, with language bindings for R, Java and Fortran. ArrayFire has a range of functionality, including

ArrayFire has three back ends to enable portability across many platforms: CUDA, OpenCL and CPU. It even works on embedded platforms like NVIDIA’s Jetson TK1.

In a past post about ArrayFire we demonstrated the ArrayFire capabilities and how you can increase your productivity by using ArrayFire. In this post I will tell you how you can use ArrayFire to exploit various kind of parallelism on NVIDIA GPUs. Continue reading

# Learn GPU Programming in Your Browser with NVIDIA Hands-On Labs

As CUDA Educator at NVIDIA, I work to give access to massively parallel programming education & training to everyone, whether or not they have access to GPUs in their own machines. This is why, in partnership with qwikLABS, NVIDIA has made the hands-on content we use to train thousands of developers at the Supercomputing Conference and the GPU Technology Conference online and accessible from anywhere with an internet connection. Using any supported browser, you can easily get started learning how to program for massively parallel GPUs at nvidia.qwiklab.com.

Using the powerful IPython Notebook technology, NVIDIA hands-on labs are immersive, self-paced experiences that run on real GPUs in the cloud.  Lab instructions, editing and execution of code, and even interaction with visual tools are all weaved together into a single web application.

# 12 Things You Should Know about the Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform

You may already know NVIDIA Tesla as a line of GPU accelerator boards optimized for high-performance, general-purpose computing. They are used for parallel scientific, engineering, and technical computing, and they are designed for deployment in supercomputers, clusters, and workstations. But it’s not just the GPU boards that make Tesla a great computing solution. The combination of the world’s fastest GPU accelerators, the widely used CUDA parallel computing model, and a comprehensive ecosystem of software developers, software vendors, and data center system OEMs make Tesla the leading platform for accelerating data analytics and scientific computing.

The Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform provides advanced system management features and accelerated communication technology, and it is supported by popular infrastructure management software. These enable HPC professionals to easily deploy and manage Tesla accelerators in the data center. Tesla-accelerated applications are powered by CUDA, NVIDIA’s pervasive parallel computing platform and programming model, which provides application developers with a comprehensive suite of tools for productive, high-performance software development.

This post gives an overview of the broad range of technologies, tools, and components of the Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform that are available to application developers. Here’s what you need to know about the Tesla Platform. Continue reading

# CUDA Pro Tip: Use cuFFT Callbacks for Custom Data Processing

Digital signal processing (DSP) applications commonly transform input data before performing an FFT, or transform output data afterwards. For example, if the input data is supplied as low-resolution samples from an 8-bit analog-to-digital (A/D) converter, the samples may first have to be expanded into 32-bit floating point numbers before the FFT and the rest of the processing pipeline can start.

The cuFFT library included with CUDA 6.5 introduces device callbacks to improve performance of this sort of transforms. Callback routines are user-supplied device functions that cuFFT calls when loading or storing data. You can use callbacks to implement many pre- or post-processing operations that required launching separate CUDA kernels before CUDA 6.5.

## Example DSP Pipeline

In this blog post we will implement the first stages of a typical DSP pipeline as depicted in Figure 1. We will first discuss a solution without callbacks using multiple custom kernels which we then use as a stepping stone towards a solution based on cuFFT device callbacks. The source code for both versions is available on github.

Batches of 8-bit fixed-point samples are input to the DSP pipline from an A/D converter. Each sample consists of 1024 data points. For more efficient processing, we group samples into batches of 1000 samples each. Therefore, you can think of this input as a 1000×1024 matrix of 8-bit fixed-point values. Continue reading

# Accelerate Machine Learning with the cuDNN Deep Neural Network Library

Machine Learning (ML) has its origins in the field of Artificial Intelligence, which started out decades ago with the lofty goals of creating a computer that could do any work a human can do.  While attaining that goal still appears to be in the distant future, many useful tools have been developed and successfully applied to a wide variety of problems.  In fact, ML has now become a pervasive technology, underlying many modern applications.  Today the world’s largest financial companies, internet firms and foremost research institutions are using ML in applications including internet search, fraud detection, gaming, face detection, image tagging, brain mapping, check processing and computer server health-monitoring, to name a few.  The US Postal Service uses machine learning techniques for hand-writing recognition, and leading applied-research government agencies such as IARPA and DARPA are funding work to develop the next generation of ML systems.

There is a wide variety of algorithms and processes for implementing ML systems. The hottest area in ML today however, is the area of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs).  The success of DNNs has been greatly accelerated by using GPUs, which have become the platform of choice for training large, complex DNN-based ML systems. Pioneers in this area include luminaries like Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Andrew Ng.  Their success over the past 30 years has inspired a groundswell of research and development in academia, including universities such as Carnegie Mellon, NYU, Oxford, Stanford, University of California at Berkeley, University of Montreal, and the University of Toronto. More recently, many commercial enterprises have also started investing aggressively in this technology.  A few that have publicly acknowledged using GPUs with deep learning include Adobe, Baidu, Nuance, and Yandex.

Because of the increasing importance of DNNs in both industry and academia and the key role of GPUs, NVIDIA is introducing a library of primitives for deep neural networks called cuDNN.  The cuDNN library makes it easy to obtain state-of-the-art performance with DNNs, and provides other important benefits.

## Machine Learning with DNNs

A ML system may be thought of as a system that learns to recognize things of interest to us, without being told explicitly what the things are ahead of time. Classic examples of such a system are the spam classifier, which scans your incoming messages and quarantines spam emails, and product recommender systems which suggest new products (books, movies, etc.) that you might like based on your prior purchases and ratings. Continue reading

# 10 Ways CUDA 6.5 Improves Performance and Productivity

Today we’re excited to announce the release of the CUDA Toolkit version 6.5. CUDA 6.5 adds a number of features and improvements to the CUDA platform, including support for CUDA Fortran in developer tools, user-defined callback functions in cuFFT, new occupancy calculator APIs, and more.

## CUDA on ARM64

Last year we introduced CUDA on ARM, and in March we released the Jetson TK1 developer board, which enables development of CUDA on the NVIDIA Tegra K1 system-on-a-chip which includes a quad-core 32-bit ARM CPU and an NVIDIA Kepler GPU. There is a lot of excitement about developing mobile and embedded parallel computing applications on Jetson TK1. And this week at the Hot Chips conference, we provided more details about our upcoming 64-bit Denver ARM CPU architecture.

CUDA 6.5 takes the next step, enabling CUDA on 64-bit ARM platforms. The heritage of ARM64 is in low-power, scale-out data centers and microservers, while GPUs are built for ultra-fast compute performance. When we combine the two, we have a compelling solution for HPC. ARM64 provides power efficiency, system configurability, and a large, open ecosystem. GPUs bring to the table high-throughput, power-efficient compute performance, a large HPC ecosystem, and hundreds of CUDA-accelerated applications. For HPC applications, ARM64 CPUs can offload the heavy lifting of computational tasks to GPUs. CUDA and GPUs make ARM64 competitive in HPC from day one.

Development platforms available now for CUDA on ARM64 include the Cirrascale RM1905D HPC Development Platform and the E4 ARKA EK003Eurotech has announced a system available later this year. These platforms are built on Applied Micro X-Gene 8-core 2.4GHz ARM64 CPUs, Tesla K20 GPU Accelerators, and CUDA 6.5. As Figure 1 shows, performance of CUDA-accelerated applications on ARM64+GPU systems is competitive with x86+GPU systems.

# Drop-in Acceleration of GNU Octave

cuBLAS is an implementation of the BLAS library that leverages the teraflops of performance provided by NVIDIA GPUs.  However, cuBLAS can not be used as a direct BLAS replacement for applications originally intended to run on the CPU. In order to use the cuBLAS API:

• a CUDA context first needs to be created
• a cuBLAS handle needs to be initialized
• all relevant data needs to be copied to preallocated GPU memory, followed by deallocation after the computation

Such an API permits the fine tuning required to minimize redundant data copies to and from the GPU in arbitrarily complicated scenarios such that maximum performance is achieved.  But it is less convenient when just a few BLAS routines need to be accelerated (simple data copy) or when vast amounts of code need to be modified (large programmer effort).  In these cases it would be useful to have an API which managed the data transfer to and from the GPU automatically and could be used as a direct replacement for CPU BLAS libraries.

Additionally, there is the common case where the input matrices to the BLAS operations are too large to fit on the GPU.  While using the cuBLAS API to write a tiled BLAS implementation (which achieves even higher performance) is straightforward, a GPU BLAS library which implemented and managed such tiling in a near optimal way would certainly facilitate access to the computing power of the GPU.

To address these issues, CUDA 6 adds new Multi-GPU extensions, implemented for the most compute intensive BLAS Level 3 routines. They are called cuBLAS-XT and can work directly with host data, removing the need to manually allocate and copy data to the GPU’s memory. NVBLAS is a dynamic library built on top of these extensions which offers a transparent BLAS Level 3 acceleration with zero coding effort.  That is, CPU BLAS libraries can be directly replaced with NVBLAS.  As such, NVBLAS can be used to easily accelerate any application which uses level-3 BLAS routines.