[Beowulf] OT? GPU accelerators for finite difference time domain

[Richard Walsh]

Mark Hahn wrote:
>> If you want to use GPUs for computations, I suggest that you take a
>> look at CUDA
>> (http://www.nvidia.com/cuda). The SDK is available for free and  it is
>> using a C like syntax (so you don't need to write shader and be
>> familiar with OpenGL or DX9 ).
> there's ATI/AMD's CTM effort as well, as well as several independent
> ones.
> www.gpgpu.org is a great resource to start with.
This connects back to an earlier posting of mine which drew a "dead cat
bounce" for a
response ... ;-) ... , but you should also definitely look at both the
offerings of PeakStream
and RapidMind.  PeakStream (like CUDA) provides libraries and a
development environment
(their current focus is GPUs), but abstract the idea of co-processing
one step further
 to a virtual machine (Mitrion-C does the same for FPGAs) connected to a
master serial
processor.  Any additional co-processing resource (any of several
flavors of GPUs, a CELL
SPE, or non-rank zero,homogenous multi-cores, etc.) can provide the
horse power for the
data parallel accelerations.  They claim that once a particular backend
for the VM is
available you will be able run your code without a recompile on it or
any other supported
backend.   I think the RapidMind product is similar.  Peakstream has a
nice white paper on
their web site and the main Rapid Mind paper is:

Data-parallel Programming on the Cell BE and the GPU using RapidMind
Developoment
Platform by Mike McCool.

The jist of my earlier posting was "Does such a data-parallel VM
abstraction have a future
in an HPC world of heterogeneous on and off-chip co-processors?"  Its
presence as part
of the  Mitrion-C and PeakStream programming models suggests someone
with money
believes as much.

rbw



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-- 

--

Richard B. Walsh

Project Manager
Network Computing Services, Inc.
Army High Performance Computing Research Center (AHPCRC)
rbw at ahpcrc.org  |  612.337.3467

>
>  "Making predictions is hard, especially about the future."
>
>   Nils Bohr

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