Archive for August, 2008
They’re not just for gaming
There was a time when video game consoles and graphics cards were “just for games.” In those days, game console chips and graphics cards were the domain of little boys, not grown men. Well, thank the stars those days are long gone!
Today, if someone were to tease a grown man for purchasing Sony’s Playstation 3, he could simply reply, “I beg your pardon. I am a grown man, not a little boy. I am clearly using the Playstation 3, not to play great games like Grand Theft Auto IV and Metal Gear Solid, but to use its TeraFLOPS (1 trillion floating point calculations per second) capacity to solve important and complex scientific problems.”
It almost sounds like a fantasy, but it’s not. The idea behind this is pretty basic. To make games and graphics run smoothly, video game console chips and graphics cards have to do a mind-boggling number of calculations much faster than a basic computer chip can. It “just so happens” that the supercomputers scientists and Wall Street analysts use to do simulations and research with also need to do those same types of calculations. Hence the idea of Stream Processing was born – why not use graphics card/game console chips for things which aren’t directly related to graphics or gaming?
Why not indeed? I can’t list all of the projects out there, but here’s just a snapshot of the scientific applications that people have been able to do with the Playstation 3’s unique chip, IBM’s Cell Broadband Engine, and graphics cards from NVIDIA and AMD:
- Researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research used NVIDIA’s CUDA stream processing platform to improve the speed of their weather forecasting models
- Astrophysicist Gaurav Khanna from UMass Dartmouth used 16 Playstation 3’s to simulate the collision of two black holes
- AMD researchers were able to demonstrate the use of AMD graphics cards to let a computer see in 3D and then map that image to an actual physical simulation
- The Los Alamos National Laboratories turned to IBM to design them a new supercomputer, but instead of just designing them with plain vanilla chips from Intel and AMD, they asked for a new breed of computer. Enter the Roadrunner, a computer which when fully operational will be capable of PetaFLOPS performance (1 quadrillion floating point calculations per second), and consists of ~7000 AMD Opteron chips coupled with ~13000 Cell processors
- The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, by using 3 NVIDIA graphics processors, was able to help perform biochemical simulations at a submolecular level 100 times faster than 18 typical computer CPUs.
Technology – it’s good for more than just playing games.
Step One
Hi. I’m Eric, and I am a tech-oholic. So are Ben, Kevin, and Anthony. And we’re not the least bit sorry about it. We all also happen to share an interest in technology, especially as it applies to science. As we’re all busy people, we figured that team-blogging would keep the momentum going while still giving us time to survive our Real Life jobs. Hope you enjoy it!