Re: Graphics Card Processing?

[Martin <inkubus@interalpha.co.uk>]

> This may sound crazy, but it's something I've been wondering about, so I
> thought I would ask.
> 
> I remember reading a while back about a university that built a cluster
> of Sony Playstation 2s, but instead of doing the main processing work
> with the CPUs, they used the processors on the graphics cards. 
Umm... they probably used the 'Emotion engine' which is implemented
(partially) as a MIPS co-processor and partially as a render pipeline. 
Basically it's a powerful vector engine (also see VIS w/ the UltraSPARC
chips).  This is different the more recent approach of using GPU's that
are generally programmable for computation.

> So, I've got a Sun Ultra 10 with the Ultra 3d video card installed. Is
> there any project/software that might allow me to use the Ultra 3d as a
> secondary processor in this machine?
Not that I know of and it wouldn't really be a second processor.  GPU
design is rather radically different to CPU design.

> This machine is just going to be
> used for web/mysql/e-mail, so I don't have any use for the graphics card
> installed. For that matter, I plan on avoiding installing Xwindows, for
> security reasons.
For web/mysql/e-mail you are probably going to need high throughput and
good disk access / I/O rather than floating point performance.  Even if
you could use a graphics card like this (and TBH I doubt the Ultra 3D
can be used in this way) then you wouldn't really help as the work load
isn't FP intensive.

> Any thoughts, tips, hints or urls would be appreciated.
If you are interested in using the Ultra 3D for something odd then look
at the kernel drivers and docs from Sun to look at what it's exact
capabilities are.  If you are interested in looking at processing using
GPUs, start by hunting some of the recent academic papers on it; which I
believe have mostly been using x86 / AGP cards.

HTH

Cheers,
 - Martin

-- 
Martin
inkubus@interalpha.co.uk
"Seasons change, things come to pass"