[Beowulf] gpgpu

[Nifty niftyompi Mitch]

On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 08:34:00PM -0400, Joe Landman wrote:
>> How long have people been doing gpgpu for?
>
> I remember hearing of people working on programming SGI Onyx pipelines  
> in 1997 or so.  This was one of the US national labs.  Not sure if there  
> was much before that.
>
> -- 
> Joseph Landman, Ph.D

Joe's date sounds about right.

There was a lot of exploration but for the most part the floating point engines in SGI 
pipelines were not ieee.    They were specialized to the GL and OpenGL code base not
general purpose computation.

In that time frame here was an SGI internal marketing T-shirt that Intel squashed....
The theme was "Attitude inside" inside a image invoking swoosh that the Intel
marketing folk had issue with.

The interesting point is that in that time frame the GFX engines did contain Intel processors 

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i960

 and also 

TI dsps 

 and also 

SGI quad core processing elements....

The multi pipe and tiled array design was a study in 
both custom chip design and more importantly state
of the shelf design.



-- 

	T o m  M i t c h e l l s
	Got a great hat... now what.