I never said that anyone would pay any attention to the research. You'll have to write your congressman for that. With the current administration in power I'm just happy that the research is getting done, so that maybe someone will notice it someday.
I think that as long as we have the research going on actively, there's still some hope. Once people stop caring about even finding out, then we're in trouble.
Depends on the problem and the memory performance as much as it does on the GPU. There's no good answer to that question. For kicks though, this paper has some measurements for matrix multiply using ATLAS. It's comparing a Pentium 4 to an NV40 GPU. The P4 wins at about 7 GFlops, and the NV40 loses due to horrible memory performance. That's pretty ironic considering that the NV40 has quite a few more FPU's, and that they're in parallel. It's a good example of why you can't ever say for sure how a processor's going to perform until you test it on a real workload.
Despite the fact that BlueGene/L is being built to simulate nukes, this kind of research does impact some of these other issues, and there is government money going into them. Here are some examples... The National Center for Atmospheric Research uses supercomputers to simulate effects of pollution and global warming, and projects like LEAD are using grids with supercomputers attached to predict weather. Check out some of the projects at RENCI, as well. There's NIH-sponsored genetic research in addition to the weather stuff.
It may be sad that we live in a world where nuclear weapons research is driving the computing power, but it doesn't mean that the power of BlueGene/L isn't going to be used for thousands of other peaceful scientific applications, too.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that as long as we have the research going on actively, there's still some hope. Once people stop caring about even finding out, then we're in trouble.
Depends on the problem and the memory performance as much as it does on the GPU. There's no good answer to that question. For kicks though, this paper has some measurements for matrix multiply using ATLAS. It's comparing a Pentium 4 to an NV40 GPU. The P4 wins at about 7 GFlops, and the NV40 loses due to horrible memory performance. That's pretty ironic considering that the NV40 has quite a few more FPU's, and that they're in parallel. It's a good example of why you can't ever say for sure how a processor's going to perform until you test it on a real workload.
It may be sad that we live in a world where nuclear weapons research is driving the computing power, but it doesn't mean that the power of BlueGene/L isn't going to be used for thousands of other peaceful scientific applications, too.