Monday, December 22, 2003

Using a Programming Language for your Graphics Card




This Brook Language is interesting. Now one can think of the graphics card as a CPU. Some of the numbers I have seen seem to be in line with some of the FGPA speed I had looked into earlier. Maybe a real use of this type of Hardware is to go after the first prime with 10^6 digits. Or maybe, stream processing is the only way to solve the linear transport equation. A good review of what it or cannot do can be found here. Looks like it is ideally suited for a Monte_carlo type of computation. We did a small study on a shading type of algorithm with an 2 million gates FPGA and the thing was beating a pentium 2 GHz machine a hundredfold. The interesting information was that the FPGA was only running at about 100 MHz. A 2 Ghz general CPU is beaten on a specific purpose computation a hundredfold with a chip clocked at 1/20th the rate.

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