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Australia's CSIRO To Launch CPU-GPU Supercomputer
bennyboy64 contributes this excerpt from CRN Australia: "The CSIRO will this week launch a new supercomputer which uses a cluster of GPUs [pictures] to gain a processing capacity that competes with supercomputers over twice its size.
The supercomputer is one of the world's first to combine traditional CPUs with the more powerful GPUs.
It features 100 Intel Xeon CPU chips and 50 Tesla GPU chips, connected to an 80 Terabyte Hitachi Data Systems network attached storage unit. CSIRO science applications have already seen 10-100x speedups on NVIDIA GPUs."
Can someone explain exactly what the benefits/drawbacks of using GPUs for processing?
GPUs are massively parallel handling hundreds of cores and tens of thousands of threads. The drawbacks are they have limited instruction sets and don't support a lot of the arbitrary jumping, memory loading, etc. that CPUs do.
It would also be nice if someone could give a quick run down of what sort of applications GPUs are good at.
Anything that is massively parallelisable and processing intensive. The usual bottle neck with GPU programming in normal computers is the overhead of loading from RAM to GPU-RAM. Remove this bottleneck in a custom system and you can have enormous speed ups in parallel applications once you compile the code down to GPU instructions.
Greater detail I will leave to the experts...
Okay, that's not quite true, most tasks benefit from piddling about on the CPU, but demanding tasks would be better off running on something faster and more specialised. The barrier to that is that it's harder to write GPGPU code.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
You lost me there, your car analogy contains a train, which threw me off track.
I hate printers.