General-purpose computing on graphics processing units: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 15:50, 23 June 2006

Revision as of 20:52, 3 July 2006

Line 57:

Kernels can be thought of as the body of loops. For example, if the programmer was operating on a grid on the CPU he might have code that looked like this:

<pre>

(To Be Done)

/* Pseudocode */

x = 1000

y = 1000

make array x by y

for each "x" { // Loop this block 1000 times

for each "y" { // Loop this block 1000 times

do_some_hard_work(x, y) // This is done 1000x1000 times (1 000 000)

}

} </pre>

On the GPU, the programmer only specifies the body of the loop as the kernel and what data to loop over by drawing geometry. For example, if the programmer wanted to run the kernel over the entire grid, he would draw a full screen quad to create fragments over each grid cell (i.e. over each pixel).