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Out of curiosity, are there strong reasons to leverage GPUs in standard web application development from a general-purpose standpoint? Can I leverage this to en

Out of curiosity, are there strong reasons to leverage GPUs in standard web application development from a general-purpose standpoint? Can I leverage this to enhance a general-purpose server or database? If so, anywhere I can read more? Always interested in what kinds of things one can do when new offerings like this are made.

user5994461 10y ago
GPU have no application whatsover for the usual web applications.
wmf 10y ago
Besides 3D graphics and machine learning, GPUs are also good for image resizing/encoding and video encoding/transcoding. But I haven't heard of anyone trying to accelerate Node.js or MongoDB on GPUs.
yeukhon 10y ago
Short answer: no. Long answer: if and only if you can really parallelize your processing into very small calculation each doesn't take a lot of memory, and you have a lot of time of writing special code using special framework. Perhaps streaming encoding in real time could be one, but that's already sort of beyond general web application. GPU is powerful because a GPU usually has 100+ cores. Each core is weak and inefficient, but power adds up when you have 100+ cores available. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_computing_on_graphics_processing_units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_computing_on_g...
- arnon 10y ago
  GPUs have over 3000 cores nowadays (http://images.nvidia.com/content/tesla/pdf/nvidia-tesla-p100-PCIe-datasheet.pdf http://images.nvidia.com/content/tesla/pdf/nvidia-tesla-p100...)
tmostak 10y ago
You can run MapD (https://www.mapd.com https://www.mapd.com) and get big speedups over CPU analytic databases (http://tech.marksblogg.com/benchmarks.html http://tech.marksblogg.com/benchmarks.html). We'll be launching on Google Cloud soon.
arnon 10y ago
SQream DB (http://www.sqream.com http://www.sqream.com) is an SQL analytics database which uses GPUs. It is on both AWS P2 and Azure NC machines, and it can do very fast analytics on hundreds of raw terabytes on those. Having said that, on-premise or bare-metal is about 25% faster than AWS P2 for large datasets (over 2TB). For smaller datasets that may fit in-memory, they function about the same.

user5994461 10y ago

GPU have no application whatsover for the usual web applications.

wmf 10y ago

Besides 3D graphics and machine learning, GPUs are also good for image resizing/encoding and video encoding/transcoding. But I haven't heard of anyone trying to accelerate Node.js or MongoDB on GPUs.

yeukhon 10y ago

Short answer: no. Long answer: if and only if you can really parallelize your processing into very small calculation each doesn't take a lot of memory, and you have a lot of time of writing special code using special framework. Perhaps streaming encoding in real time could be one, but that's already sort of beyond general web application. GPU is powerful because a GPU usually has 100+ cores. Each core is weak and inefficient, but power adds up when you have 100+ cores available. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_computing_on_graphics_processing_units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_computing_on_g...

arnon 10y ago
GPUs have over 3000 cores nowadays (http://images.nvidia.com/content/tesla/pdf/nvidia-tesla-p100-PCIe-datasheet.pdf http://images.nvidia.com/content/tesla/pdf/nvidia-tesla-p100...)

tmostak 10y ago

You can run MapD (https://www.mapd.com https://www.mapd.com) and get big speedups over CPU analytic databases (http://tech.marksblogg.com/benchmarks.html http://tech.marksblogg.com/benchmarks.html). We'll be launching on Google Cloud soon.

arnon 10y ago

SQream DB (http://www.sqream.com http://www.sqream.com) is an SQL analytics database which uses GPUs. It is on both AWS P2 and Azure NC machines, and it can do very fast analytics on hundreds of raw terabytes on those. Having said that, on-premise or bare-metal is about 25% faster than AWS P2 for large datasets (over 2TB). For smaller datasets that may fit in-memory, they function about the same.