Using GPU's (Radeon, GeForce, etc.) for things other than graphics

[NFS4]

I found this quite interesting:

Any sort of computation of a collection of data where elements interact with other elements with high locality is extremely efficient on a GPU. In fact, the GPU can be from 10 to 100 times faster than a Pentium 4 in such situations, says Kirk. Scientific computations such as linear algebra, Fast Fourier Transforms, and partial differential equations can also benefit greatly from GPUs. One research group is looking to break the Linpack benchmark world record using a cluster of 256 PCs with GeForce FXs! Another scenario that surprised Kirk was when a development team recently tried to use a GeForce FX CPU to perform database key sorting. When coded to take advantage of the parallelism and pipelining in the GPU, parallel key sorts and searches can occur much faster than using general CPUs, on the order of 4-5x faster than the Pentium 4, according to Kirk.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1091392,00.asp

 

[jbond04]

I read that article a couple days back when it was posted on Extremetech. What I'm interested in is when GPU's will be able to accelerate my 3D animation renderings... With the advent of programmable graphics cards that have high FP precision, this should be possible...I'm just waiting for a company to actually make this a reality. When they do, they'll have my money. Imagine entire render farms being replaced by a couple of graphics cards...

 

[ElFenix]

i asked the president of UD if they could write software to run on the geforce

but that was a long time ago