5 ms·

NVIDIA Announces Tesla Personal Supercomputer

21 points by jaydub 18y ago

jm4 18y ago
This sounds cool, but the page linked to is only a standard press release and the link to the interesting stuff is buried in the marketing-speak. The fun stuff is here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/personal_computing.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/personal_computing.html
bootload 18y ago
I took a look at the Tesla after viewing an Nvidia demo with the Mythbusters Adam & Jamie doing a simple demo of CPU v's GPU which you can see here ~ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKK933KK6Gg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKK933KK6Gg Firstly you can run the thing as either a card (cheaper, slower) or standalone machine (expensive, nobody lists the price). The CUDA toolkit which is C based is Win/Lin 32/64 bit compatible and available for most mainstream disto's ~ http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_learn.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_learn.html "... The Tesla architecture is built around a scalable array of multithreaded Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) ..." If you think this is a similar to mainstream development think again. Programming with this machine is right down to the metal and reminds me of programming the PS2 and other specialised consoles. You need to spend some time reading the Hardware manuals, understand the architecture to use the machine to it's capability.
- SirWart 18y ago
  I had some friends who tried to port the Linpack benchmark to a small cluster of computers each with 8 NVIDIA GPUs using CUDA, and they found that the biggest bottleneck was the bandwidth to and from the GPUs. It's just hard to keep the GPUs fed with enough data. They confirmed that they are both hard to program and incredibly powerful.
  - DarkShikari 18y ago
    I tried CUDA programming as well and found that the threading model and such is an utter nightmare. For certain tasks its quite easy, such as upscaling or filtering an image. However, such a task is exactly the kind of task where you'll end up bandwidth-limited anyways. The kind of complex tasks where you actually fully use the GPU processors are often the exact kind of situations where the API will work against you every step of the way. The "960 cores" moniker is also very misleading, as last I recall there were really only (960/8) cores, with each core being able to run 8 instructions at the same if all the instructions were exactly the same.
    - miloshh 18y ago
      What are some of these complex tasks you had in mind? I think that almost any computation-bound task, however complex, could benefit from GPU acceleration. But I would like to hear about exceptions.
      - DarkShikari 18y ago
        A motion search, for video compression, is what I was trying. It has some huge disadvantages: 1. The threading model is completely unsuited to a search that takes a different number of iterations per block (since it wants all the threads doing the same thing). 2. CPUs already have the PSADBW instruction, which allows an absurd effective throughput: its literally an instruction dedicated to this kind of task. Its also a purely 8-bit integer problem, so it doesn't benefit from the high-performance floating point units on the GPU. Due to 1), you're pretty much restricted to either crippling your performance, using a very simplified search, or using an exhaustive search. And if you're using an exhaustive search, it turns out that there's a mathematically equivalent and vastly faster way to do it called "sequential elimination"... which is completely impractical to implement on a GPU as well due to its linear nature, and which allows a Core 2 to vastly outperform a GPU and possibly even be competitive with a dedicated FPGA doing a normal exhaustive search.
        miloshh 18y ago
        Hmmm.. OK. You mind posting a link to the pseudo-code of the algorithm? The problem of different number of iterations per thread is quite common, but can often be fixed. If all threads in a block have the same number if iterations, you're fine; different blocks can take different number of iterations. As long as the number of blocks is much higher than the number of SMs, the machine will dynamically schedule the blocks to available SMs. If each thread takes a different number of iterations, it's more difficult, but you can still do dynamic allocation yourself, by running as many blocks as you have SMs, and having each thread pick up work as it needs. You can also randomize the assignment of work to threads, so the expected amount of work is roughly the same. This all depends on the particular problem and data, though... As for the 8-bit nature of the problem - this is true, you're not utilizing the floating point units that are the biggest advantage of the GPU. How large are the vectors you need to do PSADBW over?
  - brfox 18y ago
    Protein sequence alignment implemented (open source): http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/9/S2/S10 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/9/S2/S10
- michaelneale 18y ago
  you mention ps2 - is the ps3 similar? (although its powerpc - there are 7 cores to use - so is it still as tricky?)
  - jaydub 18y ago
    the PS3 uses the Cell processor which is also tricky to program
  - DarkShikari 18y ago
    The Cell is a whole different type of nightmare, with various interesting properties: 1. Bitshifts by variable amounts take ~7 clocks each on the main PPU. 2. The SPUs have no cache whatsoever; all caching has to be done explicitly, and all memory access is DMA'd. 3. The SPUs do scalar math no faster than SIMD (in fact, from what I know, scalar math is just calling an SIMD function on a single value). 4. There is no instruction reordering on SPUs, and everything has to be synced exactly for max performance (certain instructions run on odd clock cycles, others on even cycles). 5. The SPUs are not Altivec chips. The SPU SIMD instruction set is similar to Altivec, but more versatile. Of course, this means you can't just run existing Altivec code on them. 6. Overall, the integer SIMD on SPUs is much slower than that on modern Intel processors. Not sure about float, as I have no experience in that arena.
    - michaelneale 18y ago
      Wow that sounds like a world of fun. For some definition of fun. The one that shocked me: "1. Bitshifts by variable amounts take ~7 clocks each on the main PPU" If you didn't know that, that could really bite hard.
tsally 18y ago
I guess I am a little skeptical about the market. First, I have to believe it is rare that an individual would need a super computer. Besides, any individual that actually needs one is probably going to build his/her own. Businesses might want these on a large scale, but then why market it as a personal computer?
- wmf 18y ago
  Lots of scientists, engineers, and finance people could use these. It's personal in the sense that it's used by one person, not that people would buy it for personal use. Also, it doesn't really matter whether you build or buy; either way all the cost is in the Tesla card and NVidia gets their money.
- LPTS 18y ago
  "They'll never sell more than 5 of those pc computers"
jcromartie 18y ago
960 cores. Wow. I thought that I was in over my head trying to program 2 at a time!
- jodrellblank 18y ago
  What was it Joel Spolsky said about programmers counting "It must work for 1. Oh, there's more than 1? Then it must work for any number". ;)
riobard 18y ago
Reading the title, I initially thought it was something related to the electric car ... Anyway, I guess the problem is that most programmers have no clue of how to program GPU. Programming multi-core CPU is already very hard, and now comes the GPU stuff ...
noonespecial 18y ago
I like Tesla. He was under-appreciated in his time, brilliant, and did things just for the joy of the science. I just wish they'd stop with the naming of products, rock bands, and breakfast cereals, etc. after him. Its starting to wear thin.
light3 18y ago
It'll be interesting to see how much these will cost. 4 Teraflops of single precision calculation is very impressive, however if you need double precision, the speed is not quite as impressive at 400 Gflops - although still very good compared to my laptop with 20 Gflops :) The main drawback with these is that you have to use CUDA, which certainly takes a while before you wrap your mind across. I played CUDA for a while but considered it is too much effort for something which is very specialised and might not become mainstream. Still there seems to be many people using CUDA and with lots of research roles - see the CUDA forums.
- kahseng 18y ago
  It says "Available from VARs worldwide for under $10,000" in here http://www.nvidia.com/object/personal_computing.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/personal_computing.html Now I know how it felt like in the '80s when people were looking at the mainframes/desktops of the time and wondering... can I afford this $10K machine? :)

21 points by jaydub 18y ago

jm4 18y ago

This sounds cool, but the page linked to is only a standard press release and the link to the interesting stuff is buried in the marketing-speak. The fun stuff is here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/personal_computing.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/personal_computing.html

bootload 18y ago

I took a look at the Tesla after viewing an Nvidia demo with the Mythbusters Adam & Jamie doing a simple demo of CPU v's GPU which you can see here ~ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKK933KK6Gg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKK933KK6Gg Firstly you can run the thing as either a card (cheaper, slower) or standalone machine (expensive, nobody lists the price). The CUDA toolkit which is C based is Win/Lin 32/64 bit compatible and available for most mainstream disto's ~ http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_learn.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_learn.html "... The Tesla architecture is built around a scalable array of multithreaded Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) ..." If you think this is a similar to mainstream development think again. Programming with this machine is right down to the metal and reminds me of programming the PS2 and other specialised consoles. You need to spend some time reading the Hardware manuals, understand the architecture to use the machine to it's capability.

SirWart 18y ago
I had some friends who tried to port the Linpack benchmark to a small cluster of computers each with 8 NVIDIA GPUs using CUDA, and they found that the biggest bottleneck was the bandwidth to and from the GPUs. It's just hard to keep the GPUs fed with enough data. They confirmed that they are both hard to program and incredibly powerful.
- DarkShikari 18y ago
  I tried CUDA programming as well and found that the threading model and such is an utter nightmare. For certain tasks its quite easy, such as upscaling or filtering an image. However, such a task is exactly the kind of task where you'll end up bandwidth-limited anyways. The kind of complex tasks where you actually fully use the GPU processors are often the exact kind of situations where the API will work against you every step of the way. The "960 cores" moniker is also very misleading, as last I recall there were really only (960/8) cores, with each core being able to run 8 instructions at the same if all the instructions were exactly the same.
  - miloshh 18y ago
    What are some of these complex tasks you had in mind? I think that almost any computation-bound task, however complex, could benefit from GPU acceleration. But I would like to hear about exceptions.
    - DarkShikari 18y ago
      A motion search, for video compression, is what I was trying. It has some huge disadvantages: 1. The threading model is completely unsuited to a search that takes a different number of iterations per block (since it wants all the threads doing the same thing). 2. CPUs already have the PSADBW instruction, which allows an absurd effective throughput: its literally an instruction dedicated to this kind of task. Its also a purely 8-bit integer problem, so it doesn't benefit from the high-performance floating point units on the GPU. Due to 1), you're pretty much restricted to either crippling your performance, using a very simplified search, or using an exhaustive search. And if you're using an exhaustive search, it turns out that there's a mathematically equivalent and vastly faster way to do it called "sequential elimination"... which is completely impractical to implement on a GPU as well due to its linear nature, and which allows a Core 2 to vastly outperform a GPU and possibly even be competitive with a dedicated FPGA doing a normal exhaustive search.
      - miloshh 18y ago
        Hmmm.. OK. You mind posting a link to the pseudo-code of the algorithm? The problem of different number of iterations per thread is quite common, but can often be fixed. If all threads in a block have the same number if iterations, you're fine; different blocks can take different number of iterations. As long as the number of blocks is much higher than the number of SMs, the machine will dynamically schedule the blocks to available SMs. If each thread takes a different number of iterations, it's more difficult, but you can still do dynamic allocation yourself, by running as many blocks as you have SMs, and having each thread pick up work as it needs. You can also randomize the assignment of work to threads, so the expected amount of work is roughly the same. This all depends on the particular problem and data, though... As for the 8-bit nature of the problem - this is true, you're not utilizing the floating point units that are the biggest advantage of the GPU. How large are the vectors you need to do PSADBW over?
- brfox 18y ago
  Protein sequence alignment implemented (open source): http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/9/S2/S10 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/9/S2/S10
michaelneale 18y ago
you mention ps2 - is the ps3 similar? (although its powerpc - there are 7 cores to use - so is it still as tricky?)
- jaydub 18y ago
  the PS3 uses the Cell processor which is also tricky to program
- DarkShikari 18y ago
  The Cell is a whole different type of nightmare, with various interesting properties: 1. Bitshifts by variable amounts take ~7 clocks each on the main PPU. 2. The SPUs have no cache whatsoever; all caching has to be done explicitly, and all memory access is DMA'd. 3. The SPUs do scalar math no faster than SIMD (in fact, from what I know, scalar math is just calling an SIMD function on a single value). 4. There is no instruction reordering on SPUs, and everything has to be synced exactly for max performance (certain instructions run on odd clock cycles, others on even cycles). 5. The SPUs are not Altivec chips. The SPU SIMD instruction set is similar to Altivec, but more versatile. Of course, this means you can't just run existing Altivec code on them. 6. Overall, the integer SIMD on SPUs is much slower than that on modern Intel processors. Not sure about float, as I have no experience in that arena.
  - michaelneale 18y ago
    Wow that sounds like a world of fun. For some definition of fun. The one that shocked me: "1. Bitshifts by variable amounts take ~7 clocks each on the main PPU" If you didn't know that, that could really bite hard.

tsally 18y ago

I guess I am a little skeptical about the market. First, I have to believe it is rare that an individual would need a super computer. Besides, any individual that actually needs one is probably going to build his/her own. Businesses might want these on a large scale, but then why market it as a personal computer?

wmf 18y ago
Lots of scientists, engineers, and finance people could use these. It's personal in the sense that it's used by one person, not that people would buy it for personal use. Also, it doesn't really matter whether you build or buy; either way all the cost is in the Tesla card and NVidia gets their money.
LPTS 18y ago
"They'll never sell more than 5 of those pc computers"

jcromartie 18y ago

960 cores. Wow. I thought that I was in over my head trying to program 2 at a time!

jodrellblank 18y ago
What was it Joel Spolsky said about programmers counting "It must work for 1. Oh, there's more than 1? Then it must work for any number". ;)

riobard 18y ago

Reading the title, I initially thought it was something related to the electric car ... Anyway, I guess the problem is that most programmers have no clue of how to program GPU. Programming multi-core CPU is already very hard, and now comes the GPU stuff ...

noonespecial 18y ago

I like Tesla. He was under-appreciated in his time, brilliant, and did things just for the joy of the science. I just wish they'd stop with the naming of products, rock bands, and breakfast cereals, etc. after him. Its starting to wear thin.

light3 18y ago

It'll be interesting to see how much these will cost. 4 Teraflops of single precision calculation is very impressive, however if you need double precision, the speed is not quite as impressive at 400 Gflops - although still very good compared to my laptop with 20 Gflops :) The main drawback with these is that you have to use CUDA, which certainly takes a while before you wrap your mind across. I played CUDA for a while but considered it is too much effort for something which is very specialised and might not become mainstream. Still there seems to be many people using CUDA and with lots of research roles - see the CUDA forums.

kahseng 18y ago
It says "Available from VARs worldwide for under $10,000" in here http://www.nvidia.com/object/personal_computing.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/personal_computing.html Now I know how it felt like in the '80s when people were looking at the mainframes/desktops of the time and wondering... can I afford this $10K machine? :)