Wall Street Discovers GPUs

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DrQ

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Aug 24, 2009, 1:04:13 PM8/24/09
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What does GPU stand for? Graphical Processor Unit? Wrong!

**GPUs are the new vector CPUs**

"GPU computing, a technology that is making inroads across nearly
every type of HPC application. The vector processing capabilites of
GPUs makes them especially well-suited to financial analytics."

http://www.hpcwire.com/home/specialfeaturetopitem/GPUs_Finding_A_New_Role_on_Wall_Street.html

I expect that success will be determined by the programming language
capabilities, not just the hardware. That's the bitter lesson I
learned while writing a network simulation in *LISP on the Thinking
Machines 64,000 processor CM-2 at Xerox PARC. My well-constructed LISP
code did not perform significantly better than running it on a
SPARC-10 workstation! Substantial chunks of code had to be manually
replaced by PARIS code; the assembly language of the CM-2. Forget it!

Oh! And don't forget Intel's Ct. Anybody know how that stacks up
against CUDA?

Neil Gunther

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Aug 25, 2009, 1:11:06 PM8/25/09
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Further to this...

When Apple releases Mac OS X "Snow Leopard" <http://www.apple.com/
macosx/technology/> this coming Friday (8-28-2009), it will support
OpenCL <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL>, an Apple-based standard
that enables dynamic allocation of work to any of GPUs (fine-gained
parallelism), multicores (course-grained parallelism) or clusters
(macro parallelism), depending on what is available/detected in the
runtime hardware.

This is a radically different approach from CUDA and Ct, but AMD,
Intel and Nvidia are supporting it through the Khronos Group. With
OpenCL, Apple aims to further unify Mac OS X across all it's
platforms, including the iPhone.


On Aug 24, 10:04 am, DrQ <redr...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> What does GPU stand for? Graphical Processor Unit? Wrong!
>
> **GPUs are the new vector CPUs**
>
> "GPU computing, a technology that is making inroads across nearly
> every type of HPC application. The vector processing capabilites of
> GPUs makes them especially well-suited to financial analytics."
>
> http://www.hpcwire.com/home/specialfeaturetopitem/GPUs_Finding_A_New_...

Peter Lauterbach

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Aug 26, 2009, 8:06:33 AM8/26/09
to Performance Visualization
On Aug 24, 1:04 pm, DrQ <redr...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> What does GPU stand for? Graphical Processor Unit? Wrong!
>
> **GPUs are the new vector CPUs**
>


> Oh! And don't forget Intel's Ct. Anybody know how that stacks up
> against CUDA?

There a discussion of using CUDA for parallel database search in this
month's USENIX login:

Programming Video Cards for Database Applications by Tim Kaldewey
http://www.usenix.org/publications/login/2009-08/index.html

alternate version:

Parallel Search On Video Cards
Tim Kaldewey, Jeff Hagen, Andrea Di Blas, Eric Sedlar
Oracle Server Technologies - Special Projects
http://www.usenix.org/event/hotpar09/tech/full_papers/kaldeway/kaldeway_html/

I think the story is the same as always, if you have a highly parallel
problem, GPUs are a huge win for larger scales of data. Applying gobs
of commodity hardware to approach the performance of supercomputers at
a fraction of the price is always appealing (think Hadoop).

However, it is not a magic bullet, or magic feather, and there will be
application of GPUs pursued to utter failure; they will make great war
stories. Knowing when to apply them will mean all the difference
between success and failure.

Peter Lauterbach

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Oct 20, 2009, 1:25:49 PM10/20/09
to Performance Visualization
Another interesting GPU application the biomedical field.

Probing Biomolecular Machines with Graphics Processors
by James C Phillips, John E. Stone
The evolution of GPU processors and programming tools is making
advanced simulation and analysis techniques accessible to a growing
community of biomedical scientists.

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1629155

http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1629155&type=pdf
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