Comments on: GPU Occupancy and Idling http://www.azavea.com/blogs/labs/2010/07/gpu-occupancy-and-idling/ Insight on what our engineers are doing Mon, 26 Sep 2011 13:47:07 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: David Zwarg http://www.azavea.com/blogs/labs/2010/07/gpu-occupancy-and-idling/comment-page-1/#comment-250 David Zwarg Thu, 05 Aug 2010 13:35:19 +0000 http://www.azavea.com/blogs/labs/?p=590#comment-250 Hello Tom, Thanks for your comment! I have no doubt that there is much work to be done. GPUs are coming out that support double precision natively; take a look at the new Tesla and Fermi cards from NVidia. GPUs are starting to making their way into the server environment -- NVidia has at least 2 server products for intense processing: <a href="http://www.nvidia.com/page/servers.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nvidia.com/page/servers.html</a>. In addition, we've proven the technology works for a limited set of the operations supported by Map Algebra. Rewriting the Map Algebra library completely for GPGPU is going to be a lot of work. This is mostly because of the full suite of operations that are supported by "the big old legacy code dinosaur" -- no small feat in itself, and kudos to the team that built those tools. Hello Tom,

Thanks for your comment! I have no doubt that there is much work to be done. GPUs are coming out that support double precision natively; take a look at the new Tesla and Fermi cards from NVidia.

GPUs are starting to making their way into the server environment — NVidia has at least 2 server products for intense processing: http://www.nvidia.com/page/servers.html.

In addition, we’ve proven the technology works for a limited set of the operations supported by Map Algebra. Rewriting the Map Algebra library completely for GPGPU is going to be a lot of work. This is mostly because of the full suite of operations that are supported by “the big old legacy code dinosaur” — no small feat in itself, and kudos to the team that built those tools.

]]> By: Tom Gross http://www.azavea.com/blogs/labs/2010/07/gpu-occupancy-and-idling/comment-page-1/#comment-248 Tom Gross Wed, 28 Jul 2010 18:39:57 +0000 http://www.azavea.com/blogs/labs/?p=590#comment-248 Great series of blog posts on GPGPU. I see that you haven't solved the problem of why there isn't a "C" in "GPGPU" either. Just wanted to let you know that there are some of us here at the big old legacy code dinosaur who are thinking along the same lines: http://blogs.esri.com/Dev/blogs/apl/archive/2010/03/30/Computations-on-vector-data-using-a-GPU.aspx There is much work to be done. Aside from rewriting core functionality, we still have to be able to visualize results as quickly as they can be calculated. We still have to put our calculations and visualization into the server environment. We have to start operating in the 64-bit world . Much of GIS work is done on double precision data. The hardware vendors are just now beginning to produce GPUs that can handle double precision data well. It was a pleasure to read your blog. Great series of blog posts on GPGPU. I see that you haven’t solved the problem of why there isn’t a “C” in “GPGPU” either. Just wanted to let you know that there are some of us here at the big old legacy code dinosaur who are thinking along the same lines:

http://blogs.esri.com/Dev/blogs/apl/archive/2010/03/30/Computations-on-vector-data-using-a-GPU.aspx

There is much work to be done. Aside from rewriting core functionality, we still have to be able to visualize results as quickly as they can be calculated. We still have to put our calculations and visualization into the server environment. We have to start operating in the 64-bit world . Much of GIS work is done on double precision data. The hardware vendors are just now beginning to produce GPUs that can handle double precision data well. It was a pleasure to read your blog.

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