MIT Artificial Vision Researchers Assemble 16-GPU Machine

lindik writes "As part of their research efforts aimed at building real-time human-level artificial vision systems inspired by the brain, MIT graduate student Nicolas Pinto and principal investigators David Cox (Rowland Institute at Harvard) and James DiCarlo (McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT) recently assembled an impressive 16-GPU 'monster' composed of 8x9800gx2s donated by NVIDIA. The high-throughput method they promote can also use other ubiquitous technologies like IBM's Cell Broadband Engine processor (included in Sony's Playstation 3) or Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing services. Interestingly, the team is also involved in the PetaVision project on the Roadrunner, the world's fastest supercomputer."

Comments

Re:Say no to proprietary NVIDIA hardware

[ya really]

Tom's Hardware did a pretty good job detailing the ups and downs of ATI and Nvidia with many of the major games of last year (BioShock, World in Conflict, etc). Overall, both companies faired well, but they reported quite a few crashes due to the ATI drivers. I've had an ATI card before, the 9800xt when Nvidia was producing their horrible 5xxx series back in 2003-04 that was totally worthless. The 9800xt was a good card for everything (gaming, graphical aps, etc). Sorry, I should have cited sources. Wasn't trolling on purpose, though I know that writing anything positive about Nvidia on slashdot is borderline blasphemy.

Re:Say no to proprietary NVIDIA hardware

[TheRaven64]

A video card driver typically has three major components:

• The parts specific to the windowing system (including context switching / multiplexing).
• The parts specific to the 3D API.
• The parts specific to the hardware.

ATi could conceivably steal parts from the first two from nVidia, but it's doubtful that they could steal anything from the last part since their hardware designs are sufficiently different to make this hard.

The problem nVidia are going to have is that the new Gallium architecture means that the first two parts are abstracted away and reusable, as is the fall-back path (which emulates functionality any specific GPU might be missing). This means that Intel and AMD both get to benefit from the other company (and random hippyware developers and other GPU manufacturers / users) improving the generic components, while nVidia are stuck developing their own entire alternative to DRI, DRM, Gallium, and Mesa. The upshot is that Intel and AMD can spend a tiny fraction of the time (and, thus, money) developing drivers that nVidia do. In the long run, this means either smaller profits or more expensive cards for nVidia, more bugs in nVidia drivers (since they don't have the same real-world coverage testing).

Now, if you're talking just about specs, then you're just plain trolling. Intel doesn't lose anything to AMD by releasing the specs for the Core 2 in a 3000 page PDF, because the specs just give you the input-output semantics, they don't give you any implementation details. Anyone with a little bit of VLSI experience could make an x86 chip, but making one that gives good performance and good performance-per-Watt is a lot harder. Similarly, the specs for an nVidia card would let anyone make a clone, but they'd have to spend a lot of time and effort optimising their design to get anywhere close to the performance that nVidia get.

DX10 vs DX9

[DrYak]

There are 2 main differences between DX9 and DX10 :

I - The shaders offered by the two APIs are different (shader model 3 vs 4). None of the DX9 screen shot does self-shading. This is specially visible on the rocks (but even in action on the plancks of the fences). So there *are* available under Vista additional subtleties

II - The driver architecture is much more complex in Vista, because it is built to enable cooperation between several separate processes all using the graphics at the same time. Even if Vista automatically disables Aero when games are running full-screen (and thus the game is the only process accessing the graphic card), the additional layers of abstraction have an impact on performance. It is specially visible at low quality settings where the software overhead is more noticeable.