Performance analysis of a novel GPU computation-to-core mapping scheme for robust facet image modeling

Layne T. Watson

Abstract

Modern graphics processing units (GPUs) are commodity data-parallel coprocessors capable of high performance computation and data throughput. It is well known that the GPUs are ideal implementation platforms for image processing applications. However, the level of efforts and expertise to optimize the application performance is still substantial. This paper investigates the computation-to-core mapping strategies to probe the efficiency and scalability of the robust facet image modeling algorithm on GPUs. Our fine-grained computation-to-core mapping scheme achieves a significant performance gain over the standard pixel-wise mapping scheme. With in-depth performance comparisons across the two different mapping schemes, we analyze the impact of the level of parallelism on the GPU computation and suggest two principles for optimizing future image processing applications on the GPU platform.