Improving the performance of the linear systems solvers using CUDA

Abstract: Parallel computing can offer an enormous advantage regarding the performance for very large applications in almost any field: scientific computing, computer vision, databases, data mining, and economics. GPUs are high performance many-core processors that can obtain very high FLOP rates. Since the first idea of using GPU for general purpose computing, things have evolved and now there are several approaches to GPU programming: CUDA from NVIDIA and Stream from AMD. CUDA is now a popular programming model for general purpose computations on GPU for C/C++ programmers. A great number of applications were ported to CUDA programming model and they obtain speedups of orders of magnitude comparing to optimized CPU implementations. In this paper we present an implementation of a library for solving linear systems using the CCUDA framework. We present the results of performance tests and show that using GPU one can obtain speedups of about of approximately 80 times comparing with a CPU implementation.