I am not going to be at SC ’06 (How I’ve never made it to one of those conferences remains a mystery and a travesty). Wired is carrying an article about the next revolution in supercomputing, specifically using GPUs as accelerators, a topic that has been covered here and on other blogs before. Both ATI and Nvidia are jumping into the fray big time as the article suggests. One of the best parts of the article was that Folding@home was mentioned (its not all about gaming). The article suggests that, in general, the speed gains made by GPUs are far greater than those made by CPUs, however, the data from Folding@home and UNC suggests significant variance and algorithm dependence. In other words, certain applications will benefit greatly from GPUs (probably those with lots of floating point calculations, while others will not. I think given the push from ATI and NVidia, we will have an excellent idea of the applications where GPUs will provide the most benefit fairly soon.
Some might think my views on GPUs contradict my previous posts on FPGAs, but that’s not quite true. FPGAs are specialty hardware, GPUs are not. No one is going to make a business out of selling GPUs for scientific computing. Instead the onus will be on software developers to take advantages of the tools that ATI and Nvidia are going to make available to them
Accelerators at SC ’06
I am not going to be at SC ’06 (How I’ve never made it to one of those conferences remains a mystery and a travesty). Wired is carrying an article about the next revolution in supercomputing, specifically using GPUs as accelerators, a topic that has been covered here and on other blogs before. Both ATI and Nvidia are jumping into the fray big time as the article suggests. One of the best parts of the article was that Folding@home was mentioned (its not all about gaming). The article suggests that, in general, the speed gains made by GPUs are far greater than those made by CPUs, however, the data from Folding@home and UNC suggests significant variance and algorithm dependence. In other words, certain applications will benefit greatly from GPUs (probably those with lots of floating point calculations, while others will not. I think given the push from ATI and NVidia, we will have an excellent idea of the applications where GPUs will provide the most benefit fairly soon.
Some might think my views on GPUs contradict my previous posts on FPGAs, but that’s not quite true. FPGAs are specialty hardware, GPUs are not. No one is going to make a business out of selling GPUs for scientific computing. Instead the onus will be on software developers to take advantages of the tools that ATI and Nvidia are going to make available to them
Further Reading
Drinking the koolaid …
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