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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."
it is well understood that GPUs are fast. what scientists want to know is what kind of precision issues are involved in using the GPU?
1) When will the GPU fully support the IEEE-754 standard for single precision
2) When will the GPU include at least emulated support for double precision
Many algorithms do not work well in single precision because error propagation really hurts.