Article: Parallelism at HotPar 2010
By: Richard (no.delete@this.email.com), August 19, 2010 4:51 am
Room: Moderated Discussions
>>Do you realize that texture unit does interpolation on low-precision fix-point
>>numbers? It's not good enough even for sonar/radar beam forming. Applicability to
>>traditional HPC is extremely rare. Except, may be, final visualization phase, but
>>that better handled by classic GPU APIs rather than GPGPU.
>IIRC, 32-bit FP textures were in Nvidia's GPUs since series 6 hw.
32-bit textures filtering wasn't available in hardware until the geforce 8 series. You could go around this by using a custom shader, but this would slow things down.
The filtering hardware can be very useful for a certain class of problems. I have seen 100x speedups in ray casting, computer vision techniques, and custom graphics rendering (i.e. without using a graphics API). While GPGPU might not be applicable to all problems or even most traditional HPC problems at the moment, GPGPU certainly has its place and continues to evolve.
While sonar/radar beam forming may not have been possible, displaying radar was done on Geforce6 series at high resolutions and high frame rates in 2005/2006. Although this was still graphics related, it was implemented using GPGPU techniques using shaders and was impossible on CPUs of the time. Cheap Geforces replaced expensive custom hardware (and the whole team designing it).
>>numbers? It's not good enough even for sonar/radar beam forming. Applicability to
>>traditional HPC is extremely rare. Except, may be, final visualization phase, but
>>that better handled by classic GPU APIs rather than GPGPU.
>IIRC, 32-bit FP textures were in Nvidia's GPUs since series 6 hw.
32-bit textures filtering wasn't available in hardware until the geforce 8 series. You could go around this by using a custom shader, but this would slow things down.
The filtering hardware can be very useful for a certain class of problems. I have seen 100x speedups in ray casting, computer vision techniques, and custom graphics rendering (i.e. without using a graphics API). While GPGPU might not be applicable to all problems or even most traditional HPC problems at the moment, GPGPU certainly has its place and continues to evolve.
While sonar/radar beam forming may not have been possible, displaying radar was done on Geforce6 series at high resolutions and high frame rates in 2005/2006. Although this was still graphics related, it was implemented using GPGPU techniques using shaders and was impossible on CPUs of the time. Cheap Geforces replaced expensive custom hardware (and the whole team designing it).
