3 ms·

Any problem where you have large vectors or matrices of floats and must add, subtract, divide, or multiply on them in parallel for performance reasons. A GPU is

by krapht 11y ago

Any problem where you have large vectors or matrices of floats and must add, subtract, divide, or multiply on them in parallel for performance reasons. A GPU is like a miniature datacenter in your computer! But, unlike a real datacenter, it's only good for floats. But many financial, scientific, and gaming applications are only bottlenecked by the need to crunch floats, not arbitrary data types. My mental model of a GPU is a device that has a million billion miniature 4-function calculators inside it that can all do things at once.

artmageddon 11y ago
Yeah, all of that makes sense. I guess I'm just in search of a problem to work on that would make it worthwhile to learn CUDA :)
- krapht 11y ago
  If you are a web developer, you might try WebGL? Same ideas, different packaging focused on graphics. Once you get the hang of it, you've got the language paradigm to understand CUDA, OpenCL, etc. If you write business software... I'm so sorry. But I've heard things about GPU-accelerated SQL queries? I don't know much. I've never programmed a database, ever, except small SQL queries here and there.
  - artmageddon 11y ago
    Yeah I tend to work on the latter, trying to get more on the former. I used to work in a color science company, and I wanted to see if it were possible to use CUDA for math optimizations, but the kind we did wasn't all that intense and there wasn't much traction in doing any kind of GPGPU work. I'm back in Finance now and I'm sure there are opportunities for it here, but the amount of red-tape we have here is so ridiculous(i.e. we can't even get source control for our C++ programs we manage). I'll just have to push harder to learn :)
bsprings 11y ago
"unlike a real datacenter, it's only good for floats." That's actually not true. You'll find integer throughput is rather high on GPUs also. And the memory bandwidth is very high too. "miniature 4-function calculators": make that 5, where the fifth function is a really fast special function unit that can do very fast sin, cos, sqrt, 1/sqrt, and many other functions.

by krapht 11y ago

artmageddon 11y ago

Yeah, all of that makes sense. I guess I'm just in search of a problem to work on that would make it worthwhile to learn CUDA :)

krapht 11y ago
If you are a web developer, you might try WebGL? Same ideas, different packaging focused on graphics. Once you get the hang of it, you've got the language paradigm to understand CUDA, OpenCL, etc. If you write business software... I'm so sorry. But I've heard things about GPU-accelerated SQL queries? I don't know much. I've never programmed a database, ever, except small SQL queries here and there.
- artmageddon 11y ago
  Yeah I tend to work on the latter, trying to get more on the former. I used to work in a color science company, and I wanted to see if it were possible to use CUDA for math optimizations, but the kind we did wasn't all that intense and there wasn't much traction in doing any kind of GPGPU work. I'm back in Finance now and I'm sure there are opportunities for it here, but the amount of red-tape we have here is so ridiculous(i.e. we can't even get source control for our C++ programs we manage). I'll just have to push harder to learn :)

bsprings 11y ago

"unlike a real datacenter, it's only good for floats." That's actually not true. You'll find integer throughput is rather high on GPUs also. And the memory bandwidth is very high too. "miniature 4-function calculators": make that 5, where the fifth function is a really fast special function unit that can do very fast sin, cos, sqrt, 1/sqrt, and many other functions.