Impressive Benchmarks: Sorting with a GPU

An anonymous reader writes "The Graphics research group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has posted some interesting benchmarks for a sorting implementation which is done entirely on a GPU. There have been efforts on doing general purpose computation on GPUs before (previous Slashdot article). However, most of them had generally utilized the fragment processing pipeline of the GPUs which is slower then the default high speed rendering pipeline. Apparently, the above implementation is done using "simple texture mapping operations" and "cache efficient memory accesses" only. There also seems to an option to download the distribution for non-commercial use, though the requirements seem pretty hefty (a very decent nVidia graphics card and the latest nVidia drivers)."

Comments

Obl. Futurama quote

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparantly, the above implementaion is done using "simple texture mapping operations" and "cache efficient memory accesses" only.

Fry: Magic. Got it.

I knew somebody who did math on a "blitter"

[crovira]

(Smalltalk bit block transfer) He was always making assmptions about the underlying virtual engine.

He was always getting it wrong too. I have logged thousands of hours and thousands of miles, from Montreal, Canada to Lisbon, Portugal cleaning up after this yobbo. What a fuckup he was.

The opinion was shared too. It got to the point to where we could write code that would detect his code and, as soon as we came across it and confirmed it we would remove it and read the original spec to know what to code.

"Ghoul" was a geek's geek. He stayed married about a week to a co-worker's daughter. Sad in a funy sort'o way.

very decent?

[mnemonic_]

a very decent nVidia graphics card

So is that like "average", except "very average"?