[Beowulf] What class of PDEs/numerical schemes suitable for GPU clusters

[Mark Hahn]

> Ellis, I can't say re. the Firestream cards, but for Nvidia the answer is a
> resounding yes.

AMD had some PR recently (check the reg and inq) about supporting their 
stream stuff across the whole product line, including chipset-integrated
gpus.  that seems intelligent, given that lines between CPU and GPU are 
obviously blurring in the future (Larrabee, Fusion, etc).

IMO, it would be crazy to invest too much in the current gen of gp-gpu 
programming stuff.  doing some pilot stuff with both vendors probably
makes sense, but the field really does need OpenCL to succeed.  I hope 
the OpenCL people are not too OpenGL-ish, and realize that they need 
to target SSE and SSE512 as well.

> Virtually any recent card can run CUDA code. If you Google you can get a
> list of compatible cards.

not that many NVidia cards support DP yet though, which is probably 
important to anyone coming from the normal HPC world...  there's some 
speculation that NV will try to keep DP as a market segmentation 
feature to drive HPC towards high-cost Tesla cards, much as vendors 
have traditionally tried to herd high-end vis into 10x priced cards.

regards, mark hahn.