CaravelaMPI: Message Passing Interface for Parallel GPU-Based Applications

With the ever increasing demand for high quality 3D image processing on markets such as cinema and gaming, graphics processing units (GPUs) capabilities have shown tremendous advances. Although GPU-based cluster computing, which uses GPUs as the processing units, is one of the most promising high performance parallel computing platforms, currently there is no programming environment, interface or library designed to use these multiple computing resources to compute tasks in parallel. This paper proposes the CaravelaMPI, a new message passing interface targeted for GPU cluster computing, providing a unified and transparent interface to manage both communication and GPU execution. Experimental results show that the transparent interface of CaravelaMPI allows to efficiently program GPU-based clusters, not only decreasing the required programming effort but also increasing the performance of GPU-based cluster computing platforms.