From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <3e1162e60605050959h304276d7nbbf928c2405f2189@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Fri,  5 May 2006 09:59:44 -0700
From: "David Leimbach" <leimy2k@gmail.com>
To: "Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs" <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: Re: [9fans] nvidia scrolling performance
In-Reply-To: <59C58783-A3E0-4D01-A3BE-FFC24A212762@telus.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Disposition: inline
References: <10b3044aa926a9c4115682ad88c1983a@quanstro.net>
	<999CCCBC-2504-4212-9629-E63C2A79BCA5@telus.net>
	<3e1162e60605050901h76225ba5g968a975bdcbd608f@mail.gmail.com>
	<59C58783-A3E0-4D01-A3BE-FFC24A212762@telus.net>
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 4da99a76-ead1-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025

> I'm really hoping that we can find a way to get our users off the C/C+
> + bandwagon (and that includes the high-level shading languages as
> well) and using something that can express the required computations
> more naturally.  There are some promissing-looking functional
> approaches, but there's a huge barrier to adoption if it doesn't look
> like C.

DSLs (Domain Specific Languages) aren't as hip as they should be IMO.=20
People like to do evil metaprogramming stuff to twist languages into
weird syntactical sugary notation, then want to cry when the compiler
produces some unintelligble error messages about what's going on.

General purpose languages have their place of course... but a language
that lets you work closer to the problem space seems to almost always
produce more elegant code.

If C were everything to everyone, Fortran wouldn't still be in heavy
use in certain circles.

Dave


>
> Paul
>
> On 5-May-06, at 9:01 AM, David Leimbach wrote:
>
> > On 5/5/06, Paul Lalonde <plalonde@telus.net> wrote:
> >> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> >> Hash: SHA1
> >>
> >> Aw, but I'd claim all that fancy 3-D graphics stuff is real
> >> computation :-)
> >> But yeah, GPU abuse for general purpose computation is just plain
> >> scary.  I thank my lucky stars that there is plenty of FLOPS to go
> >> around in the Cell's SPUs.
> >>
> >
> > Eh, nvidia's working on making the GPUs more accessible (via
> > compilers, kind of like Cell) for more general purpose computation.
> >
> > The problem with FPGA, GPU, and "non-local" coprocessing cores is
> > usually the moving of data to them fast enough.  Cell shouldn't have
> > this problem and with the new hypertransport stuff coming out, it
> > looks like one can easilly do NUMA like things inter-chassis too.
> >
> > I don't know if this is cost effective, but streaming parallelism to
> > special coprocessors can be a big win in HPC.
> >
> > Dave
> >
> >> Paul
> >>
> >> On 5-May-06, at 8:46 AM, erik quanstrom wrote:
> >>
> >> > if i were doing real computation, i wouldn't use a gpu i'd use a
> >> > cpu. ;-)
> >> >
> >> > - erik
> >> >
> >> >> 8G/s? Nowhere near enough.  Enough for text, but try doing real
> >> >> computation using that GPU...
> >> >> PS3 is running 25G/s bi-directional.  Those bits move.
> >> >>
> >>
> >> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> >> Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (Darwin)
> >>
> >> iD8DBQFEW3W0pJeHo/Fbu1wRAoOzAJ9C4d5WBnPm4hH1scoknQI1sFfuTgCgqC9c
> >> Ft6mIE9ogrlaD9ltrNkMmjg=3D
> >> =3DqWgd
> >> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
> >>
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (Darwin)
>
> iD8DBQFEW3ulpJeHo/Fbu1wRAtbrAJ0RH5SpW4ZIx0W7BZIh3QXCRXt5MwCfYLVG
> 4DsnaEAu+s0hp/wAVsJZ5+U=3D
> =3DR5Qr
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>