I received this question in reference to an article from a few months ago. My paper was about functionality instead of mere performance, though my comments regarding RDMA-based overhead should hint at how poor InfiniBand is for some applications. Many of the benchmarks out there assume that the memory region is being reused and that […]
Archives for November 2006
What is the difference between AMD's Stream Processor and NVIDIA's GeForce 8800? (Or, is Cray's strategy the right one after all?)
November 14, 2006 by
AMD has announced a Stream Processor that comes from its recent acquisition of ATI. The processor is currently available on a PCI Express board and is provided with one gigabyte of dedicated memory. It also comes with the Close to Metal (CTM) interface for software developers. CTM is the target of stream programming platforms such […]
What is CUDA?
November 10, 2006 by
CUDA (compute unified device architecture) is NVIDIA’s GPU architecture featured in the GeForce 8800. Positioning itself as a new means for general purpose computing with GPUs, CUDA provides 128 cooperating cores. Because the cores can communicate with each other, the GPU can run multithreaded applications without the need for stream computing. Along with this innovation, […]
How can we overcome bus saturation in multi-core systems?
November 3, 2006 by
Multi-core systems, in combination with specialized co-processors for hefty tasks, are hailed as the future of high-performance computing. In a bus-based architecture, the environment is an SMP in which all of the memory is accessible by all of the processors in the same amount of time. This setup works well for a few cores, but […]
