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AMD Preps For Server Graphics Push
Nerval's Lobster writes "AMD named John Gustafson as senior fellow and chief product architect of AMD's Graphics Business Unit, the former ATI graphics business unit. Gustafson, known for developing a key axiom governing parallel processing, will apply that knowledge to AMD's more traditional graphics units and GPGPUs, co-processors that have begun appearing in high-performance computing (HPC) systems to add more computational oomph via parallel processing. At the Hot Chips conference, AMD's chief technical officer, Mark Papermaster, also provided a more comprehensive look at AMD's future in the data center, claiming that APUs were the keystone of the 'surround computing era,' where a wealth of data — through sensors, gestures, voice, augmented reality, metadata, and HD video and graphics — will need to be contextualized, analyzed, and either encrypted or assigned privacy policies. That, of course, means the cloud must shoulder the computational burden."
We have things we didn't have last time.
Massive central storage
Enormous bandwidth
Excellent frameworks for distributed processing (no RPC does not count)
Long ago.. your Cloud had to be custom built for the app. EC2 doesn't have that restriction. I know the people who developed S3. They had no idea they'd be hosting thier Killer App. (Netflix) at design-time. It's that flexible.
Plus, we now have PCs. No one is saying we have to go back to thin clients, you can keep your PC, and you the cloud where it excels. Gmail and Netflix Streaming are both things for which I've done the equivalents on home servers, and they don't hold a candle to the cloud versions.
Except a modern GPU is basically a coprocessor that, 99% of the time, is used to run a library that primarily does graphics. Rendering, shading, transformation, those are now all done "in software". The only things still done "in hardware" are texture lookups and video output (turning an int[4][1080][1920] into a DVI or HDMI or VGA or whatever signal.
They're also a pretty high-volume market, so you get them much cheaper than you would a custom-built coprocessor or even FPGA, and they're *probably* better-designed than the one you would make, as they have entire teams of professionals working on them.
Also, both nVidia and AMD already make "compute-only" cards - nVidia under the brand "Tesla", AMD under the brand "FireStream".
There's a big problem, however: http://developer.amd.com/sdks/AMDAPPSDK/assets/App_Note-Running_AMD_APP_Apps_Remotely.pdf
To run apps that use AMD's GPU's remotely (ie. not from a local X11 session - and I mean "Local X11 session"), you have to open a security hole so big you can fit Rush Limbaugh's ego through it.
* Log into the system as root. /dev/ati/card*
* Add "Xhost +" to your X11 startup config (so every X session allows anybody to access it... with root permissions)
* chmod ugo+rw
I asked a group of devs from X.org how stupid it was... the short answer is "how stupid is giving root access to everybody?"
So, I asked AMD when they were planning on fixing the problem.
Short answer: Not for the foreseeable future.
I seem to recall a similar issue where CERT told users not to use AMD drivers for Windows, because it forces Windows to disable many of its security features.
I'm sensing a trend...
Do you want this kind of irresponsibility in the datacenter? EVER?
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.