I'm really hoping that we can find a way to get our users off the C/C+ + bandwagon (and that includes the high-level shading languages as well) and using something that can express the required computations more naturally. There are some promissing-looking functional approaches, but there's a huge barrier to adoption if it doesn't look like C.
DSLs (Domain Specific Languages) aren't as hip as they should be IMO. People like to do evil metaprogramming stuff to twist languages into
weird syntactical sugary notation, then want to cry when the compiler produces some unintelligble error messages about what's going on. General purpose languages have their place of course... but a language that lets you work closer to the problem space seems to almost always produce more elegant code. If C were everything to everyone, Fortran wouldn't still be in heavy use in certain circles. Dave
Paul On 5-May-06, at 9:01 AM, David Leimbach wrote: > On 5/5/06, Paul Lalonde <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- >> Hash: SHA1 >> >> Aw, but I'd claim all that fancy 3-D graphics stuff is real >> computation :-) >> But yeah, GPU abuse for general purpose computation is just plain >> scary. I thank my lucky stars that there is plenty of FLOPS to go >> around in the Cell's SPUs. >> > > Eh, nvidia's working on making the GPUs more accessible (via > compilers, kind of like Cell) for more general purpose computation. > > The problem with FPGA, GPU, and "non-local" coprocessing cores is > usually the moving of data to them fast enough. Cell shouldn't have > this problem and with the new hypertransport stuff coming out, it > looks like one can easilly do NUMA like things inter-chassis too. > > I don't know if this is cost effective, but streaming parallelism to > special coprocessors can be a big win in HPC. > > Dave > >> Paul >> >> On 5-May-06, at 8:46 AM, erik quanstrom wrote: >> >> > if i were doing real computation, i wouldn't use a gpu i'd use a >> > cpu. ;-) >> > >> > - erik >> > >> >> 8G/s? Nowhere near enough. Enough for text, but try doing real >> >> computation using that GPU... >> >> PS3 is running 25G/s bi-directional. Those bits move. >> >> >> >> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- >> Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (Darwin) >> >> iD8DBQFEW3W0pJeHo/Fbu1wRAoOzAJ9C4d5WBnPm4hH1scoknQI1sFfuTgCgqC9c >> Ft6mIE9ogrlaD9ltrNkMmjg= >> =qWgd >> -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- >> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (Darwin) iD8DBQFEW3ulpJeHo/Fbu1wRAtbrAJ0RH5SpW4ZIx0W7BZIh3QXCRXt5MwCfYLVG 4DsnaEAu+s0hp/wAVsJZ5+U= =R5Qr -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
