Adaptation of a GPU simulator for modern architectures
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The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECpE) contains two focuses. The focus on Electrical Engineering teaches students in the fields of control systems, electromagnetics and non-destructive evaluation, microelectronics, electric power & energy systems, and the like. The Computer Engineering focus teaches in the fields of software systems, embedded systems, networking, information security, computer architecture, etc.
History
The Department of Electrical Engineering was formed in 1909 from the division of the Department of Physics and Electrical Engineering. In 1985 its name changed to Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering. In 1995 it became the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
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1909-present
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- Department of Electrical Engineering (1909-1985)
- Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering (1985-1995)
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- College of Engineering (parent college)
- Department of Physics and Electrical Engineering (predecessor)
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Abstract
GPUs have evolved quite radically during the last ten years, providing
improvements in the areas of performance, power consumption, memory,
and programmability, increasing interest in them. This increase
in interest, especially in academic research into GPU architecture,
has led to the creation of the widely used GPGPU-Sim, a GPU simulator
for general purpose computation workloads. The simulation models
currently available for simulation are based on older architectures,
and as new GPU architectures have been introduced, GPGPU-Sim has not been
updated to model them.
This project attempts to model a more modern GPU, the Maxwell based
GeForce GTX Titan X. This is accomplished by modifying the existing
configuration files for one of the older simulation models. The
changes made to the configuration files include changing the GPU's
organization, updating the clock domains, and increasing cache and
memory sizes. To test the accuracy of the model, eleven GPGPU
programs, some having multiple kernels, were chosen to be executed by
the model and by the physical hardware, and compared using IPC as the
metric.
While for some of the kernels the model performed within 16% of the
GeForce GTX Titan X, there were an equal number of kernels for which
the model performed either much faster or much slower than the hardware.
It is suspected that the cases for which the model performed much faster
were ones in which either the hardware executed single precision instructions
as double precision instructions, or the hardware ran an entirely different
machine code for the same kernel than the model. The cases for which the model
performed much slower are suspected to be due to the fact that the Maxwell
memory subsystem cannot currently be accurately modeled in GPGPU-Sim.