Why 'Gaming' Chips Are Moving Into the Server Room

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 15, 2010 @07:37AM 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.'"

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Re:Yes, of course by Yvan256 · 2010-07-15 07:54 · Score: 5, Funny

Portal 2? It's something for our Web server. It adds more portals to access the internet.
Re:A whole new level of parallelism by Dynetrekk · 2010-07-15 08:08 · Score: 5, Insightful

Believe me, when you change the way you think about how an algorithm works, it doesn't matter if you are using 3 or 10000 processors.
Have you ever read up on Amdahl's law?