Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Why 'Gaming' Chips Are Moving Into the Server Room

Posted by timothy on from the expense-report-manipulation-++ dept.

Esther Schindler writes "After several years of trying, graphics processing units (GPUs) are beginning to win over the major server vendors. Dell and IBM are the first tier-one server vendors to adopt GPUs as server processors for high-performance computing (HPC). Here's a high level view of the hardware change and what it might mean to your data center. (Hint: faster servers.) The article also addresses what it takes to write software for GPUs: 'Adopting GPU computing is not a drop-in task. You can't just add a few boards and let the processors do the rest, as when you add more CPUs. Some programming work has to be done, and it's not something that can be accomplished with a few libraries and lines of code.'"

4 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. Yes, of course by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    The sysdamins need new machines with powerful GPUs, you know, for business purposes.

    Oh and, they sell ERP software on Steam now, too, so we'll have to install that as well.

    1. Re:Yes, of course by Yvan256 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Portal 2? It's something for our Web server. It adds more portals to access the internet.

  2. Re:A whole new level of parallelism by pushing-robot · · Score: 3, Funny

    Microsoft must be doing a bang-up job then, because when I'm in Windows it doesn't matter if I'm using 3 or 10000 processors.

    --
    How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
  3. Crysis 2... by drc003 · · Score: 2, Funny

    ...coming soon to a server farm near you!