[Beowulf] OT? GPU accelerators for finite difference time domain

[Richard Walsh]

Mark Hahn wrote:
>> The next gen of hardware will support native double precision (AFAIK).
>
> my point is that there's native and there's native.  if the HW supports
> doubles, but they take 8x as long, then there's still a huge reason to
> make sure the program uses only low-precision.  and 8x (WAG, of course)
> may actually be enough so that a 4-core, full-rate SSE CPU to beats it
I would be surprised if they "faked" double precision is this way.  GPUs
are the widest thing
you can get in a processor.  My WAG is that they will provide true/fast
64-bit (minus the same
IEEE 754 twiddles) by coalescing 32-bit ... reducing the floating point
width of a given
core by half, but still delivery lots of FLOPs.  Especially with the
G80, it makes to think of these
GPUs and multi-core SIMD processors.

rbw

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-- 

--

Richard B. Walsh

Project Manager
Network Computing Services, Inc.
Army High Performance Computing Research Center (AHPCRC)
rbw at ahpcrc.org  |  612.337.3467

>
>  "Making predictions is hard, especially about the future."
>
>   Nils Bohr

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