Peakstream software taps into GPU for supercomputing power

While building a supercomputer has been whittled down to a science, Peakstream has developed a suite of applications that look towards those speedy PCI Express slots -- not the CPU socket -- for an extra boost of power. The company boldly states that a supercomputer can be created by harnessing the power of "common CPUs combined with the resources of modern graphics cards" to increase performance by "20x." This extreme form of load balancing exploits the tremendous potential housed in today's GPUs in order to schedule workloads, offload tasks onto the optimal processor(s), and manage calculations to minimize the queue of tasks to be completed. Granted, the biggest boon of a graphics processor is the extraordinary floating-point performance; for instance, ATi's X1950 XTX pumps out 750 GFLOPS in dual-graphics mode, while it'd take 31 Intel Xeon 5100 CPUs to crank out those same figures -- thus Peakstream feels that mathematical and computational applications (sorry, Doom fans) are best suited for its software. While having your own personal supercomputer churning those Engadget Folding@home cycles would be mighty impressive, the average joe isn't apt to drop $2,000 (per node) for Peakstream's suite, but maybe this explains the real intentions behind those 200 watt, energy sucking, externally-housed graphics cards after all.

[Grizz @ Sep 19th 2006 12:29PM]

So what exzactally does packet stream do? They write software to let you utilise the crazy untapped power in a videocard or something? If it costs me nothing and helps me fold faster, then consider me 3100% all for it, so to speak. =-)

[Henry @ Sep 19th 2006 12:43PM]

Wait, so would this work in a Macbook Pro in the Expresscard Slot?

[Steve Packard @ Sep 19th 2006 1:19PM]

Haha. Reminds me those great old 3DFX commercials

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2541946034993106617&q=3dfx&hl=en
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9097376684805873187&q=3dfx&hl=en


It's an interesting idea. I know that modern GPU's are amazingly fast at what they are designed to do. (Lots of floating point calculations and matrix stuff). However, given that they are not really general purpose processors, I was not aware that they could be used in such a way without hardware modifications. I would have to assume that the CPU would basically slave the tasks to the GPU which the GPU is good at.

Of course...this would not work with any existing software, since the hardware setup and processor instructions would be completely different. At the very least, it would have to be recompiled. However...it seems this is geared toward those who would be working with custom software to begin with.

Then again...it would be an interesting idea to build this capability into more standardized stuff, like heavy statistics programs or physics stuff....oh wait. Don't they already have an accelerator for that?

[kOa7 @ Sep 19th 2006 2:53PM]

Henry, express card isn't used for video. Internally, the macbook pro is using a pci express connection for video (which doesn't mean its upgradeable). Anyway, this technology isn't for the casual user, at least not at this point.

[apoc @ Sep 19th 2006 5:11PM]

humm, sounds like Accelerator, but they're not telling the whole story, the 20x speed boost is only for image processing tasks, could help a lot in photoshop/video editing.

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=230668

[Mark D. @ Sep 19th 2006 5:47PM]

Didn't 3dfx have a few photoshop plugins that were gpu-accelerated back in the day, or was that one of the 'to-be-added' features of the v5 6000? I know I read it once, but never thought much about it at the time.