[Beowulf] Nvidia FERMI/gt300 GPU

[Igor Kozin]

> Not only CUDA and OpenCL, but also DirectX, DirectCompute, C++, and
> Fortran. From a programmer's point of view, it could be a major
> improvement, and the only thing which still kept people from using
> GPUs to run their code.

all of the above but C++ can be used on the current hardware.
CUDA Fortran is already available in PGI 9.0-4 (public beta).

> On a side note, it's funny to notice that this is probably the first
> GPU in history to be introduced by its manufacturer as a
> "supercomputer on a chip", rather than a graphics engine which will
> allow gamers to play their favorite RPS at never-reached resolutions
> and framerates. Reading some reviews, it seemed that the traditional
> audience of such events (gamers) were quite disappointed by not really
> seeing what the announcements could mean to them.
> After all, HPC is still a niche compared to the worldwide video games
> market, and it's impressive that NVIDIA decided to focus on this tiny
> fraction of its prospective buyers, rather than go for the usual
> my-vertex-pipeline-is-longer-than-yours. :)

yes, indeed and such a strong skew towards HPC worries me. there is
almost no word how gamers are going to benefit from Fermi apart from
C++ support. in the mean time RV770 offers 2.7 TFlops SP and 1/4 of
that in DP which positions it pretty close to Fermi in that respect.
in RV770, quick integer operations are in 24-bit and i wonder if the
same still holds true for Fermi.