GPULib 1.2 was released last week and is available on the Tech-X website. This release focused on improved MATLAB bindings with a few important bug fixes for the IDL bindings along with a few new kernels. Full release notes below.

Changes/new features in GPULib version 1.2

General

  • The main focus of this release is on the improved MATLAB bindings.
  • Some new kernels were added since the release of version 1.0.8

GPULib kernels

  • gpuAtan2, gpuFmod, gpuPow

IDL bindings

  • Support for the new kernels. For the time being, these functions only support float and double (so no complex types) and no affine transform arguments.
  • Added example bwtest.pro showing the use of page-locked variables for fast CPU/GPU data transfer.
  • Added finite-different time-domain example demonstrating the use of views for efficient array sub-selection
  • Added spectral angle mapper example.
  • Bug fixes for decon_hubble example
  • improved documentation

MATLAB bindings

MATLAB GPULib version 1.2 has many major changes from the previous release. READ the README!

First and foremost, there are two distinct and completely separate interfaces to the library. They should NEVER be intermingled.

  • The accArray class replaces the old gpuArray class from the previous release. This interface requires MATLAB R2008a or higher. This interface has automatic garbage collection, overloaded operators, and overloaded versions of native MATLAB functions, …
  • “gpu” interface class can be used with older versions of MATLAB though it’s not clear how far back one can go.

The interface was redesigned for speed. The accArray class is about 2.5X faster than the gpuArray interface for many functions tested. Some of the “gpu”-prefixed functions can be up to 10X faster than the gpuArray interface.

MATLAB GPULib has many new functions including:

  • fft, ifft, fft2, and ifft2
  • Reduction operations, including sum, cumsum, prod, cumprod, … These functions support 1D vectors and 2D matrices currently.
  • Single (Complex) and Double (Complex) precision versions of Matrix Multiplication, Transpose and Complex Conjugate Transpose.

The accArray class does not support the subsref.m (i.e. b=A(i)), subsasgn.m (i.e. A(i)=b), or array concatentation functions like A=[B; C; D], These will be supported in future releases.

The “gpu” interface supports subscripting through the gpuSubsref, gpuSubsasgn, and gpuSub2ind functions.

Both interfaces support page-locked host memory allocation via cudaMallocHost. This gives the possibility of much faster memory transfer from CPU memory to GPU memory and back.

Both interfaces include more comprehensive native MATLAB-like documentation.

New examples include: bench, bwtest, fdtd, and fftExample.

Full disclosure: I work for Tech-X Corporation and worked on the IDL bindings and examples for GPULib.