Graphics chips help supercomputers become commonplace
An interesting article in Computer Weekly the other week about how graphics chips could help supercomputers become commonplace made me think.
It says that for around the cost of £3,000 scientists will soon be able to buy supercomputers for their desks rather than spend millions of pounds !
It seems that by treating each graphics chip as a separate machine PC's can run up to 40 times faster (and example being the Nvidia 9800GX2 graphics processing unit that uses more than 128 smaller processors that are able to work in parallel with the main CPU processor, which usually has between two and four processors). By using eight of these GPUs in parallel, it is possible to obtain supercomputer performance - equal to a cluster of hundreds of PCs within a single PC.
For someone that can remember Commodore Pets coming into existance and who first worked on a mini computer ( a PDP15) that had less computing power than is found in musical birthday cards nowdays this is a bit scary, but also quite exciting - imagine the possibilities for looking for cures for diseases if we could harness this power.
Thursday, August 07, 2008