[Beowulf] NVIDIA GPUs, CUDA, MD5, and "hobbyists"

[John Hearns]

On Wed, 2008-06-18 at 16:31 -0700, Jon Forrest wrote:
> Kilian CAVALOTTI wrote:

> I'm glad you mentioned this. I've read through much of the information
> on their web site and I still don't understand the usage model for
> CUDA. By that I mean, on a desktop machine, are you supposed to have
> 2 graphics cards, 1 for running CUDA code and one for regular
> graphics? If you only need 1 card for both, how do you avoid the
> problem you mentioned, which was also mentioned in the documentation?
Actually, I should imagine Kilian is referring to something else,
not the inbuilt timeout which is in the documentation. But I can't speak
for im.



> Or, if you have a compute node that will sit in a dark room,
> you aren't going to be running an X server at all, so you won't
> have to worry about anything hanging?

I don't work for Nvidia, so I can't say!
But the usage model is as you say - you can prototype applications which
will run for a short time on the desktop machine, but long runs are
meant to be done on a dedicated back-end machine.
If you want a totally desk-side solution, they sell a companion box
which goes alongside and attaches via a ribbon cable. I guess the art
here is finding a motherboard with the right number and type of
PCI-express slots to take both the companion box and a decent graphics
card for X use.


> 
> I'm planning on starting a pilot program to get the
> chemists in my department to use CUDA, but I'm waiting
> for V2 of the SDK to come out.
> 

Why wait? The hardware will be the same, and you can dip your toe in the
water now.