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This AI Paper Unveils a Reverse-Engineered Simulator Model for Modern NVIDIA GPUs: Enhancing Microarchitecture Accuracy and Performance Prediction

GPUs are widely recognized for their efficiency in handling high-performance computing workloads, such as those found in artificial intelligence and scientific simulations. These processors are designed to execute thousands of threads simultaneously, with hardware support for features like register file access optimization, memory coalescing, and warp-based scheduling. Their structure allows them to support extensive data parallelism and achieve high throughput on complex computational tasks increasingly prevalent across diverse scientific and engineering domains.

A major challenge in academic research involving GPU microarchitectures is the dependence on outdated architecture models. Many studies still use the Tesla-based pipeline as their baseline, which was released more than fifteen years ago. Since then, GPU architectures have evolved significantly, including introducing sub-core components, new control bits for compiler-hardware coordination, and enhanced cache mechanisms. Continuing to simulate modern workloads on obsolete architectures misguides performance evaluations and hinders innovation in architecture-aware software design.

Some simulators have tried to keep pace with these architectural changes. Tools like GPGPU-Sim and Accel-sim are commonly used in academia. Still, their updated versions lack fidelity in modeling key aspects of modern architectures such as Ampere or Turing. These tools often fail to accurately represent instruction fetch mechanisms, register file cache behaviors, and the coordination between compiler control bits and hardware components. A simulator that fails to represent such features can result in gross errors in estimated cycle counts and execution bottlenecks.

Innovative, early-phase clinical trials of drug–radiotherapy combinations

Over the past few decades, breakthroughs in cancer biology at the molecular level have revolutionised cancer treatment. Enhanced precision in radiotherapy has not only reduced patient side-effects, but also enabled the delivery of high-dose stereotactic extracranial irradiation with unprecedented accuracy. Simultaneously, the number of medical therapies available for clinical care continues to grow. Despite the progress made with combined chemoradiotherapy, only a few drug–radiotherapy combinations have received clinical approval, leaving a vast landscape of untapped opportunities for basic, translational, and clinical research, particularly in early-phase drug–radiotherapy trials.

A new wave in ultrafast magnetic control

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) have developed an innovative method to study ultrafast magnetism in materials. They have shown the generation and application of magnetic field steps, in which a magnetic field is turned on in a matter of picoseconds.

The work has been published in Nature Photonics.

Magnetic fields are fundamental to controlling the magnetization of materials. Under static or slowly varying conditions, a material’s magnetization aligns with the external field like a compass needle. However, entirely new magnetization dynamics emerge when magnetic fields change on timescales—faster than the material’s response time.

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