> The bus problem is a general one. E.g. modern graphic cards have a very > powerfull GPU. One could use this e.g. for the computation of neural > networks. The theoretic speedup is impressive, but the practical is low or > it even slows down things. The neural-network-computation must - in > comparision to the data - very large. Otherwise the transfer of data eats up > all the speedup.
this reminds me of two 'graduate student' hacks i got to see in the early 90's. the SGI machines at that time had special-purpose hardware to do point rotations and translations, and a giant bank of high-speed RAM that would otherwise go unused if you weren't doing graphics. the thinking was, hey, why not break down this NxN matrix multiplications into little 4x4 pieces, and use the graphics ram as if it were freely available for any particular purpose. feed the data array in as if it were a group of points describing an object that you needed to rotate, hit it against the 4x4 chip with parameters representing little 4x4 chunks of the larger NxN transformation, and read your data out of the graphics RAM as it became available. another cute trick that i still laugh about was a solution to the 'there are no machines available for you to use' problem. the affected student rewrote his code in postscript and sent it to the printer. sure, it tied up the cheap processor in the printer overnight, but then it printed out the results. :) s. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail beta. http://new.mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list [email protected] http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
