Re: GPU-based Compute Cloud

--- On Wed, 6/11/08, Khazret Sapenov <sa..@gmail.com> wrote:
> What do you think about compute cloud, powered by general
> purpose GPUs (graphics processing units), dedicated entirely to stream
> processing? It'll provide good(cheap?) facilities for evolutionary
> computation or media processing (e.g. transcoding video files).
> I've read that SUN is working in this direction (apparently due
> to inoptimal price/performance ratio), and Apple just makes alternative
> to CUDA, which eventually is one step further to commodity GPGPUs,
> suitable for cloud.

The problem with a GPU cloud computing system is that it would be difficult to tailor it to a broad enough use case that the "cloud" aspect would start to become economical. The single biggest potential use case I can think of is (geo)spatial cloud computing, which tends to burn a ton of crunch doing double(+) precision geometry operations en masse. There is even some literature on using GPUs for certain core database operations.

If I had to make a prediction, I would state that GPUs won't become terribly useful for general purpose cloud infrastructure until they become just another standard compute pipeline rather than separate add-on devices, which is not too far down the road. The integration between CPUs and GPU vector processors has clearly started, and the real value of that will be commoditizing the interfaces for using GPUs for the broadest number of tasks rather than the asymmetric lash-up that defines the system now. Everyone is engineering both the GPUs and the system integration to be more broadly useful, but it isn't quite there yet IMHO.

Andrew

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