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From: Paul Lalonde <plalonde@telus.net>
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: Re: [9fans] nvidia scrolling performance
Date: Fri,  5 May 2006 09:21:57 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <59C58783-A3E0-4D01-A3BE-FFC24A212762@telus.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <3e1162e60605050901h76225ba5g968a975bdcbd608f@mail.gmail.com>

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The GPGPU stuff that is making the computation much more accessible,  
but at least in my field (games - uh make that real-time interactive  
graphical simulations) if you give me more throughput near video ram,  
I'll be sorely tempted to (surprise) use it to make more or better  
pictures.

The interesting thing about the GPU is that it exposes a (fairly)  
strict streaming computation model in which the user really only has  
control over the computation kernel, and very little control over the  
iteration construct.  That makes using the high levels of parallelism  
relatively easy and efficient.  The challenge is in expressing non- 
trivial algorithms in streaming ways.  Aaron Lefohn's Glift suite  
(http://graphics.idav.ucdavis.edu/graphics/publications/print_pub? 
pub_id=837) is a nice wrapper around that material for more general  
data structures on the GPU.  The downside is that you had better have  
a C++ compiler that does templates well.

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.

Paul

On 5-May-06, at 9:01 AM, David Leimbach wrote:

> On 5/5/06, Paul Lalonde <plalonde@telus.net> wrote:
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>>
>> 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.
>> >>
>>
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  reply	other threads:[~2006-05-05 16:21 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 27+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2006-05-05 15:46 erik quanstrom
2006-05-05 15:56 ` Paul Lalonde
2006-05-05 16:01   ` David Leimbach
2006-05-05 16:21     ` Paul Lalonde [this message]
2006-05-05 16:59       ` David Leimbach
2006-05-05 16:05   ` Wes
2006-05-05 17:07   ` Ronald G Minnich
2006-05-05 17:30     ` Paul Lalonde
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2006-05-05 18:08 erik quanstrom
2006-05-05 17:22 erik quanstrom
2006-05-05 17:32 ` Paul Lalonde
2006-05-05 16:08 erik quanstrom
2006-05-05 16:42 ` David Leimbach
2006-05-01  0:52 erik quanstrom
2006-05-01  1:00 ` Paul Lalonde
2006-05-01  0:30 erik quanstrom
2006-05-01 17:44 ` Russ Cox
2006-05-01 17:57   ` Artem Letko
2006-05-01 19:02     ` Russ Cox
2006-04-29 21:39 erik quanstrom
2006-04-30  4:00 ` jmk
2006-04-30 16:10 ` Russ Cox
2006-04-30 18:12   ` Steve Simon
2006-04-30 22:34     ` Ronald G Minnich
2006-05-01  6:52       ` Nigel Roles
2006-05-01 19:58         ` Ronald G Minnich
2006-05-01 20:10           ` David Leimbach

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