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Boost UltraSPARC T1 Floating Point w/ a Graphics Card?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the computed-outside-of-the-box dept.

alxtoth asks: "All over the web, Sun's UltraSPARC T1 is described as 'not fit for floating point calculations'. Somebody has benchmarked it for HPC applications, and got results that weren't that bad. What if one of the threads could do the floating point in the GPU, as suggested here? Even if the factory setup does not expect an video card, could you insert a low profile PCI-E video card, boot Ubuntu and expect decent performance?"

5 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. No, you cannot by keesh · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Sun SPARC kit doesn't use a BIOS. Unfortunately, nearly all modern graphics cards that haven't been specifically designed to work on non-x86* kit rely upon the BIOS to initialise the card. This massively limits the hardware availability. PCI, sadly, is only a hardware standard.

    There's been some work by David S Miller on getting BIOS emulation into the Linux kernel so that regular cards can be fooled into working, but it's not there yet and will probably fall foul of Debian's firmware loading policy (does that apply to Ubuntu too?).

  2. Probably, but it's not an optimal solution by the_humeister · · Score: 4, Informative

    Especially since current GPUs don't implement double-precision floating point math. Heh, in that vein you could add a dual Opteron single-board computer into one of the expansion slots...

  3. Yes you can.. maybe not on SPARC though.. by NekoXP · · Score: 5, Informative

    We produce an Open Firmware solution which includes an x86 emulator to bootstrap x86 hardware, specifically graphics cards and the like.

    PowerPC boards, PC graphics chips with x86 BIOS, no driver edits required on the OS side.. it is there like it would be on a PC.

    http://metadistribution.org/blog/Blog/78A3C88E-1CE 7-45B8-9C79-420134DD9B8E.html
    http://www.genesippc.com/

  4. Thanks for making me feel old... by pedantic+bore · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I remember when it was common practice to buy extra hardware to add to your system to implement fast floating point ops. First it was a box (FPS), then a few cards (Sky), then a card (Mercury), then a daughterboard (everyone), then a chip (Weitek)... and then it was on the CPU and everyone expected it to be there.

    But Sun realized that the more things change, the more they stay the same; the reason why vendors got away with making floating point an expensive option was that there are lots of workloads where floating point performance is unimportant. So they applied the RISC principle and chose to not waste a lot of silicon on the T1 implementing instructions that are not needed in their target workload, but instead figure out how to get lots of concurrent threads.

    Trying to improve floating point perf on a T1 by adding another card is like trying to figure out how to put wheels on a fish. It might be a cool hack and it might solve some particular problem but it doesn't generalize.

    If you want floating point perf and tons of threads, wait for the rock chip from Sun (and hope that Sun stays afloat long enough to ship it). It's like a T1 only moreso, with floating point for each thread.

    --
    Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
  5. Huh? CAD on Macs/Windows??? by PaulBu · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Most real life CAD software (as in, what is used to build chips inside your little computer box or your cellphone) used to be (~8 years ago) on Solaris, occasional HP/AIX, Linux. Now it is Linux, Solaris, the rest are somewhat supported, but not exactly healthy... You can get some FPGA/PCB/Solid 3D CAD on Windows, but it is nowhere near the true industrial-strength quality. Think about it this way, if you pay $100,000 for a seat, it does not really matter how much the hardware is and Sun's was winning due to general stability/availability. IBM (the big Cadence shop) pushed Cadence to release the Linux version of their software simultaneously with the Solaris version about 5 years ago, since then Linux was gaining popularity...

    There are no good techical reasons not to recompile something like this for OS-X, but if you can imagine porting a package which comes as a bookshelf of CDs from UN*X to Win API, I'd like some of the stuff you are smoking! ;-)

    Paul