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Comment Re:Can someone tell me NVidia's business model? (Score 1) 89

Discrete graphics is going away, they seem to be leaning increasingly towards the HPC market but that is tiny compared to the consumer graphics market that their company was built on. I just don't see it. Anyone?

Discrete GPU market is growing. See JPR's analyst reports http://jonpeddie.com/press-releases/details/embedded-graphics-processors-killing-off-igps-no-threat-to-discrete-gpus/

here is the full report http://jonpeddie.com/download/media/slides/An_Analysis_of_the_GPU_Market.pdf

Comment Easy way to program GPUs (Score 1) 205

There is a new easier way to program GPUs now using Directives-based compilers.

Idea is that you add some high-level pragmas to your C or Fortran code that a parallelizing compiler
uses to map to the GPU accelerator. Of course, you have to expose parallelism in the code for
the compiler to do a decent job. Example, use more data-parallel data structures. But this is a nice
incremental way to take advantage of the GPU.

Check it out at:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla-2x-4weeks-guaranteed.html?cid=dev

Sumit
NVIDIA - Tesla Group

Comment Re:Well the other thing I'd say it shows (Score 1) 77

I think this is a big misconception about GPUs. They are good at many applications - not just Linpack.

Take a look at the list of applications ranging from video transcoding to weather forecasting to computational chemistry to physics at:
http://www.nvidia.com/cuda

In fact, the researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences just ran one of the fastest scientific simulations using their GPU supercomputer (#2 on the Top500 list):
http://blogs.nvidia.com/2011/06/chinas-investment-in-gpu-supercomputing-begins-to-pay-off-big-time/

There are tons of papers at the Supercomputing conference for real "full" applications in a very diverse range of applications that are accelerated using GPUs.

Comment Highlights as per Top500 site (Score 4, Interesting) 77

The top500 site has its own take on highlights:
http://www.top500.org/lists/2011/06/press-release

- The two Chinese systems at No. 2 and No. 4 and the Japanese Tsubame 2.0 system at No. 5 are all using NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate computation, and a total of 19 systems on the list are using GPU technology.
- China keeps increasing its number of systems and is now up to 62, making it clearly the No. 2 country as a user of HPC, ahead of Germany, UK, Japan and France.
- Intel continues to provide the processors for the largest share (77.4 percent) of TOP500 systems. Intel’s Westmere processors increased their presence in the list strongly with 169 systems, compared with 56 in the last list.
- Quad-core processors are used in 46.2 percent of the systems, while already 42.4 percent of the systems use processors with six or more cores.
- Cray defended the No. 2 spot in market share by total against Fujitsu, but IBM stays well ahead of either. Cray’s XT system series remains very popular for big research customers, with three systems in the TOP 10 (one new and two previously listed).

In my opinion, the newest & most important trend in high performance computing is the advent of accelerators like GPUs.

Comment CUDA C++ and Thrust (Score 2) 187

This is an awesome development - Microsoft adding support for GPU computing in their mainstream tools and C++.

Today, CUDA C++ already provides a full C++ implementation on NVIDIA's GPUs:
http://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads

And the Thrust template library provides a set of data structures and functions for GPUs (similar in spirit to STL):
http://code.google.com/p/thrust/

- biased NVIDIA employee

Submission + - China does it again (hpcwire.com)

gupg writes: When China built the fastest supercomputer based on NVIDIA GPUs last year, a lot naysayers said this was just a stunt machine. Well, guess what — here comes the science! They are working on better material for solar panels and they ran the world's fastest simulation ever! NVIDIA (whose GPUs accelerate these applications as a co-processor) blogged on this a while ago, where they talk about how the US really needs to up its investment in high performance computing.

Comment Lots of GPU-accelerated numerical packages (Score 1) 89

There are tons of other CUDA accelerated numerical packages besides Matlab -- Mathematica, LabView, plugins / wrappers / libraries for Python, R, IDL. Some of these are linked from NVIDIA's website
http://www.nvidia.com/object/numerical-packages.html

Others from
http://www.nvidia.com/object/data_mining_analytics_database.html

Microsoft

Next Generation of Windows To Run On ARM Chip 307

Hugh Pickens writes "Sharon Chan reports in the Seattle Times that at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Microsoft showed the next generation of Windows running natively on an ARM chip design, commonly used in the mobile computing world, indicating a schism with Intel, the chip maker Microsoft has worked with closely with throughout the history of Windows and the PC. The Microsoft demonstration showed Word, PowerPoint and high definition video running on a prototype ARM chipset made by Texas Instruments, Nvidia. 'It's part of our plans for the next generation of Windows,' says Steve Sinofsky, president of Windows division. 'That's all under the hood.' According to a report in the WSJ, the long-running alliance between Microsoft and Intel is coming to a day of reckoning as sales of tablets, smartphones and televisions using rival technologies take off, pushing the two technology giants to go their separate ways. The rise of smartphones and more recently, tablets, has strained the relationship as Intel's chips haven't been able to match the low power consumption of chips based on designs licensed from ARM. Intel has also thumbed its nose at Microsoft by collaborating with Microsoft archrival Google on the Chrome OS, Google's operating system that will compete with Windows in the netbook computer market. 'I think it's a deep fracture,' says venture capitalist Jean-Louis Gassee regarding relations between Microsoft and Intel."

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