A Qualitative Comparison Study Between Common GPGPU Frameworks

The development of graphic processing units have during the last decade improved significantly in performance while at the same time becoming cheaper. This has developed a new type of usage of the device where the massive parallelism available in modern GPU’s are used for more general purpose computing, also known as GPGPU. Frameworks have been developed just for this purpose and some of the most popular are CUDA, OpenCL and DirectX Compute Shaders, also known as DirectCompute. The choice of what framework to use may depend on factors such as features, portability and framework complexity. This paper aims to evaluate these concepts, while also comparing the speedup of a parallel implementation of the N-Body problem with Barnes-hut optimization, compared to a sequential implementation