VentureBeat - Latest Comments in Nvidia pitches “personal supercomputers” to scientists

Re: Nvidia pitches “personal supercomputers” to scientists

BenjaminTseng — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:20:10 -0000

That would be an interesting application. I'm not sure how well it would work -- CUDA is typically used for mathematical applications (where you break a sophisticated mathematics problem into smaller parts that parts of the GPU can solve) and not for nonmathematical operations like database queries.

The closest I found to what you're describing is this paper on using CUDA to do a search of a DNA database: http://www.biomedcentral.co...

Re: Nvidia pitches “personal supercomputers” to scientists

BenjaminTseng — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:15:12 -0000

It's only standard C in the sense that legalese is the "standard English": on some level it's true, but substantively it's not. For the parallelism of the GPU to work, the code structure has to be adjusted, special libraries need to be linked in, and the code needs to be run through a special compiler which outputs machine code that the GPU can understand.

Re: Nvidia pitches “personal supercomputers” to scientists

jstrellner — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:29:02 -0000

This could be really good for databases, like MySQL. I'd like to see someone install it on one of these and do some performance tests.

Re: Nvidia pitches “personal supercomputers” to scientists

Ali B — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:13:56 -0000

On their website they mention that Cuda is the platform and C is the programming language:
"Standard C language for parallel application development on the GPU"

over at: http://www.nvidia.com/objec...

Re: Nvidia pitches “personal supercomputers” to scientists

Carolyn_Miami — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 12:30:18 -0000

Now how about public access super computing? Someone can use this to build a 3D arcade game. After 100 movies where the star "falls into a game" this type of computing power makes it physically possible now. I hope a commercial operation thinks about create a computer environment where the user uses a pressure suit and helmut and is suspended in air to simulate weightlessness game play. This computer could render the graphics necessary to make it in HD.