nsjacob's Journal: hacking the GPU

I've been spending alot of time recently bootstrapping my knowledge of computer graphics. My attack vector of choice is focussed on Peter Shroeder's "Hacking the GPU" course at CalTech. It's quite fascinating. The central idea is that the modern "next-gen" GPU (eg ATI 9700, NV30) is in fact a stream or SIMD computer and fully programmable at that. So, We have the ability to program this class of GPUs (as well as slightly older ancestors thereof) to to scientific computations. Physically-based sims and PDE-solvers are examples of the class of problems that can be solved by treating GPUs as stand-alone computers. It's great stuff.