[Beowulf] gpgpu

[Mikhail Kuzminsky]

In message from Vincent Diepeveen <diep at xs4all.nl> (Tue, 26 Aug 2008 
00:30:30 +0200):
>Hi Mikhail,
>
>I'd say they're ok for black box 32 bits calculations that can do with 
>a GB or 2 RAM,
>other than that they're just luxurious electric heating.

I also want to have simple blackbox, but 64-bit (Tesla C1060 or 
Firestream 9170 or 9250). Unfortunately the life isn't restricted to 
BLAS/LAPACK/FFT :-) 

So I'll need to program something other. People say that the best 
choice is CUDA for Nvidia. When I look to sgemm source, it has about 1 
thousand (or higher) strings in *.cu files. Thereofore I think that a 
bit more difficult alghorithm  as some special matrix diagonalization 
will require a lot of programming work :-(.

It's interesting, that when I read Firestream Brook+ "kernel function" 
source example - for addition of 2 vectors ("Building a High Level 
Language Compiler For GPGPU",
Bixia Zheng (bixia.zheng at amd.com)
Derek Gladding (dereked.gladding at amd.com)
Micah Villmow (micah.villmow at amd.com)
June 8th, 2008)

- it looks SIMPLE. May be there are a lot of details/source lines 
which were omitted from this example ?


>Vincent
>p.s. if you ask me, honestely, 250 watt or so for latest gpu is really 
>too much.

250 W is TDP, the average value declared is about 160 W. I don't 
remember, which GPU - from AMD or Nvidia - has a lot of special 
functional units for sin/cos/exp/etc. If they are not used, may be the 
power will a bit more lower.

What is about Firestream 9250, AMD says about 150 W (although I'm not 
absolutely sure that it's TDP) - it's as for some 
Intel Xeon quad-cores chips w/names beginning from X.

Mikhail


>On Aug 23, 2008, at 10:31 PM, Mikhail Kuzminsky wrote:
>
>> BTW, why GPGPUs are considered as vector systems ?
>> Taking into account that GPGPUs contain many (equal) execution 
>>units,
>> I think it might be not SIMD, but SPMD model. Or it depends from  
>> the software tools used (CUDA etc) ?
>>
>> Mikhail Kuzminsky
>> Computer Assistance to Chemical Research Center
>> Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry
>> Moscow
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