Section: New Software and Platforms

Barra

Participant : Sylvain Collange.

GPU simulator

Other Contributors : David Defour (Université de Perpignan), Alexandre Kouyoumdjian (Inria), Elie Gedeon (ENS Lyon), Fabrice Mouhartem (Inria)

Status : APP registration in progress. Available under the new BSD License

Research on throughput-oriented architectures demands accurate and representative models of GPU architectures in order to be able to evaluate new architectural ideas, explore design spaces and characterize applications. The Barra project (http://gforge.inria.fr/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/barra/index.php/Main_Page ) is a simulator of the NVIDIA Tesla GPU architecture.

Barra builds upon knowledge acquired through micro-benchmarking, in order to provide a baseline model representative of industry practice. The simulator provides detailed statistics to identify optimization opportunities and is fully customizable to experiment ideas of architectural modifications. Barra incorporates both a functional model and a cycle-level performance model.

Visit http://barra.gforge.inria.fr/ or contact Sylvain Collange.