Introduction to OpenACC

Mark Ebersole of NVIDIA

1:00pm Thursday, 27 September 2012, ENG 005a

Modern GPUs have grown past their graphics heritage and evolved into the world's most successful parallel computing architecture. The introduction of this talk will briefly cover where the GPU came from and how it turned into this processing powerhouse. We will then look into how to access this power by using the relatively new standard called OpenACC. This method is a balance between the maximum flexibility you get by writing your own kernels and the ease of use you get using existing libraries. We will then end the lecture looking at the existing GPU Computing ecosystem that works well with OpenACC.

As CUDA Educator at NVIDIA, Mark Ebersole teaches developers and programmers about the NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing platform and programming model, and the benefits of GPU computing. With more than ten years of experience as a low-level systems programmer, Mark has spent much of his time at NVIDIA as a GPU systems diagnostics programmer in which he developed a tool to test, debug, validate, and verify GPUs from pre-emulation through bringup and into production. Before joining NVIDIA, he worked for IBM developing Linux drivers for the IBM iSeries server. Mark holds a BS degree in math and computer science from St. Cloud State University.

Host: Marc Olano, olano@umbc.edu