MuShellX

MuShellX formalism has been developed.

The rate of increase in power of microprocessors has slowed considerably

in the last few years. Companies are switching to multicore processors, and clusters of multicore processors that can involve a significant financial investment. But GPU's (graphics processors) are increasing in speed by about a factor of two per year. Programmable GPU's are available from

only a few $10's of dollars to less than $2000. They plug into a PCIe slot in your PC and

have floating point capabilities of the order of 1Tflop (single precision) and 100GFlop double precision at the high end. They also come with up to 4GB of on board RAM. Compiler manufacturers such as the Portland Group Inc. produce C++ and Fortran 2003 compilers that make programming these devices trivial. PGI are intending to support my development project.

The GPU's are highly parallel multi thread processors.

I have purchased such a GPU and am porting NuShellX to it.

My first test was to multiply a 8192x512 matrix by a 512x8192 matrix to produce a 512x512 matrix. On my Dell Precision 490 with a 3.0GHz Xeon 5160 processor, using a single

core, with 6GB memory and 4MB shared cache, it took 140 seconds. By adding two lines to my code using the PGI compiler the time taken was of the order of 1 second!

The financial investment

The GPU will set you back £1200 or so. An academic PGI license will cost about $250 or $599 for a full commercial license. The licenses are no more expensive than other compilers and work without the GPU and support OpenMP.

The GPU cost is equivalent to a workstation

but increases its floating point performance. You can view the GPU as a fast floating point

highly parallel processor that can support a huge number of parallel threads. Of couse it is only useful in multilayered do loops.

I am now in the process of porting NuShellX

to a GPU. The name MuShellX is a hint

to the graphics card I am using. The Greek letter mu is used for a special property of a nucleus. This splits the energies of a nucleus with spin in a certain type of field that is measured in modern notation in ******.

You got it !

Watch this space!

MuShellX now has its own website;

http://knollhouse.eu

Please visit this new website for all the formalism, hardware and software tools you will require to develop this code.

DELL are our most important sponsor of MuShellX.

Nuclear Shell Model Codes

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