Thursday, June 11, 2009

Rally toward the multiprocessors and cloud computing





The rally to multiprocessor/grid/cloud computing begins. I think technology starting gradually to approach maturity point, when it's possible to crop money from the technological break. It is especially important, since mentioned areas are essential for the next economy boom/bubble cycle, which seems to ride on energy consumption:



Interesting development in this field is NVIDIA's CUDA technology which evolved from their developments done for the high-performance gaming video cards.Basically CUDA is a set of processors embedded in a GPU card, that are clustered in a blocks. Amount ranges from few hundreds in low-budget cards and up to thounsands in GPU-dedicated cards line (Tesla). There is a ready API enabling to utilize this enormous (and enormously cheap) computing power in software applications. (It integrates with VS 2005 / 2008 and from development point of view - the parallel code should be placed in a separate files [.cu], developed in plain C extended with some parallel notions. - You kind of specifying (by using special registers) which MP cluster and which processor inside of cluster is used for the specific code route.) For a now such integration is not really smooth and requires development effort, but by no doubts NVIDIA would extend it for C++ and .NET. There are some 3rd party SDK's already to integrate it with .NET actually: http://www.gass-ltd.co.il/en/products/cuda.net/Releases.aspx

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