From owner-chemistry&$at$&ccl.net Sun Feb 17 14:25:00 2008
From: "Venable, Richard (NIH/NHLBI) E venabler()nhlbi.nih.gov" <owner-chemistry(-)server.ccl.net>
To: CCL
Subject: CCL: Computing on graphical processors
Message-Id: <-36320-080217133539-2862-c0A+02B88kAoo0HagHVThg(-)server.ccl.net>
X-Original-From: "Venable, Richard (NIH/NHLBI) [E]" <venabler _ nhlbi.nih.gov>
Content-class: urn:content-classes:message
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
	boundary="----_=_NextPart_001_01C87193.DE590CD4"
Date: Sun, 17 Feb 2008 13:35:28 -0500
MIME-Version: 1.0


Sent to CCL by: "Venable, Richard (NIH/NHLBI) [E]" [venabler=-=nhlbi.nih.gov]
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

------_=_NextPart_001_01C87193.DE590CD4
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

As others have noted, wide availability, low cost (driven by the gaming =
market), and existing toolkits have favored using GPUs, which typically =
have several FPUs on board.  Some tinkering is required to get the best =
performance, based on a talk I heard recently.  A current limitation is =
that most of the FPUs are single precision (32-bit f.p.), which is =
sufficient for graphics rendering.

--
Rick Venable    5635FL/T906
Membrane Biophysics Section
NIH/NHLBI Lab. of Computational Biology
Bethesda, MD  20892-9314   U.S.A.
(301) 496-1905  venabler AT nhlbi*nih*gov



-----Original Message-----
> From: John McKelvey jmmckel,,gmail.com [mailto:owner-chemistry()ccl.net]
Sent: Sat 16-Feb-08 8:11 PM
To: Venable, Richard (NIH/NHLBI) [E]
Subject: CCL: Computing on graphical processors
=20
Hello..

It seems that there is beginning to be significant efforts to do =
processing
using video card processors.   Could someone comment on this as to why =
this
is being so successful [probably many factors, I suppose], what kinds of
computations work well on them, and what kinds of work probably do not =
work
well on them.... and why?

Thanks!

John McKelvey





------_=_NextPart_001_01C87193.DE590CD4--