Comments on Next Big Future: Nvidia Tesla supercomputer for $1500 to $60000 for...

wow...wow..and double wow - about time there was a...

2008-12-06T15:29:00.000-08:00

wow...wow..and double wow - about time there was an advancement in processing speed... but the big question - will it play WoW (World of Warcraft)...?

for computational chemisty (like what Robert Freit...

2007-06-22T11:10:00.000-07:00

for computational chemisty (like what Robert Freitas needs) I think they have to wait until Q4, 2007 or next year for two things

1. double precision floating point expected Q4 2007

2. Probably ports of the computational chemistry software. Most of the packages are written in Fortran.

there are some packages written in
c and fortran

Such as gaussian.
http://www.gaussian.com/g03_plat.htm

My latest article has some more Nvidia specs and has links to the work and discussion about opening the drivers

I added a bunch of links in the Further Reading se...

2007-06-21T16:57:00.000-07:00

I added a bunch of links in the Further Reading section to nvidia developers library, wikipedia take on the state of general purpose GPUs and some open source work with GPUs.

It looks like this will be more widely applicable than I originally thought.

I had a link and an article about the AMD/ATI fusi...

2007-06-21T16:48:00.000-07:00

I had a link and an article about the AMD/ATI fusion chip.
The concern with that is if AMD can still pull that off given the financial pounding that it is taking from Intel.

I think the General purpose GPU will have a more open program capability.

See the developer documentation and samples that nvidia provides
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda.html

I wonder what kind of speed-up there is in AIMD, o...

2007-06-21T16:17:00.000-07:00

I wonder what kind of speed-up there is in AIMD, only NAMD/VMD is mentioned; I can't wait to find out. Also, I can't wait to see what Freitas and co. do with this, and of course, the AI community as well.

One thing though about GPU programming that bothers me is the requirement that all your code has to go through a driver. When you program for an Intel CPU, you get all the documentation you want. The world of GPUs is different. The graphics card makers don't want you to have direct access, because they enable/disable certain features depending on the market. Gamers get faster shaders that are less precise than the same chip in an computer animator's card which has more precision and better wire frame support.

I think you might see a real concerted effort by the open source community to come-up with their own drivers if the number of different price points for different markets gets out of hand. When that happens, you'll be able to turn any game card into a supercomputer for no extra cost!

Another thing to consider, is the ATI/AMD merger. There are plans to put CPU and GPU cores directly on the same die. That might give you another order of magnitude performance boost right there.

I agree it is amazing. But not all FLOPS are equal...

2007-06-20T18:43:00.000-07:00

I agree it is amazing. But not all FLOPS are equal.

But for graphics and problems similar to graphics then Moore's law is being shattered.

Specialized processing systems like the Japan's petaflop MDGrape3 machine can be lot faster for particular problems.

If the problems that you are interested in are accelerated, then things are getting a lot better faster.

This is amazing!

So, 18 of these 2Tflop uni...

2007-06-20T17:24:00.000-07:00

This is amazing!

So, 18 of these 2Tflop units will cost a total of $27K. And, their total compute performance is equivalent to the #1 rated supercomputer in the world in June of 2004?

Is this true, or am I missing something here? If this is true, Moore's Law is being shattered.