[extropy-chat] Using Graphic controllers (was:Singularity econimic tradeoffs)

[Samantha Atkins]

On Apr 17, 2004, at 4:54 PM, Dan Clemmensen wrote:
>
> Another interesting point: From the point of view of raw computational 
> power, the sum of all the 3D graphics cards in the world probably 
> exceeds the sum of all CPUs in the world. Sure, the graphics cards are 
> special-purpose, but what if you had the resources to carefully create 
> algorithms that are well suited to graphics cards? basically, this 
> requires that you map your problem onto the space that is easily 
> addressed by graphics cards. The extremely obvious problem is graphics 
> rendering (DUH!) This has actually been done: you can use graphics 
> cards to run the POV-RAY backend. When you do this, a few (10?) 
> machines with graphics cards can render scenes that would otherwise 
> take hundreds of high-end CPUs.
>
> Essentially all modern motherboard "chipsets" have embedded 3D 
> graphics engines. This resource is basically unused most of the time 
> in most machines.
>

Quite a few people are expressing keen interest in using GPUs for other 
things besides graphics.  Here are a few links:

http://www.gpgpu.org  - General Purpose Computation Using Graphics 
Hardware
wwwcg.in.tum.de/Research/data/Publications/sig03.pdf  - paper on 
implementing various linear algebra operations on GPUs
http://www.sintef.no/static/AM/gpu/summary.html
http://www.eyetap.org/about_us/people/fungja/research/ - cool paper on 
using GPUs for computer vision projects
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