GPUs To Power Supercomputing's Next Revolution

evanwired writes "Revolution is a word that's often thrown around with little thought in high tech circles, but this one looks real. Wired News has a comprehensive report on computer scientists' efforts to adapt graphics processors for high performance computing. The goal for these NVidia and ATI chips is to tackle non-graphics related number crunching for complex scientific calculations. NVIDIA announced this week along with its new wicked fast GeForce 8800 release the first C-compiler environment for the GPU; Wired reports that ATI is planning to release at least some of its proprietary code to the public domain to spur non-graphics related development of its technology. Meanwhile lab results are showing some amazing comparisons between CPU and GPU performance. Stanford's distributed computing project Folding@Home launched a GPU beta last month that is now publishing data putting donated GPU performance at 20-40 times the efficiency of donated CPU performance."

Comments

Reply to #16789087

[Dr. Eggman]

"Let me see if I have this down right: With the progress of multi-core CPU's, especially looking at the AMD / ATI deal, PC's are moving towards a single 'super chip' that will do everything while phasing out the use of a truly separate graphics system. Meanwhile, supercomputers are moving towards using GPU's as the main workhorse. Doesn't that strike anybody else as a little odd?"
16789087

I picture this:

Before:
CPU makers: "Hardware's expensive, keep it simple."
GPU makers: "We can specialize the expensive hardware separatly!"


Now:
CPU makers: "Hardware's cheaper and cheaper, lets keep up our profits by making our more inclusive."
GPU makers: "We can specialize the cheap hardware in really really big number-crunch projects!"


btw, why isn't the reply button showing up? I'm too lazy to hand type the address.