Quoting Linus Harling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, on Mon 16 Jun 2008 04:31:56 PM PDT:
Vincent Diepeveen skrev:
<snip>
Then instead of a $200 pci-e card, we needed to buy expensive Tesla's
for that, without getting
very relevant indepth technical information on how to program for that
type of hardware.
The few trying on those Tesla's, though they won't ever post this as
their job is fulltime GPU programming,
report so far very dissappointing numbers for applications that really
matter for our nations.
</snip>
Tomography is kind of important to a lot of people:
http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/05/31/1633214.shtml
http://www.dvhardware.net/article27538.html
http://fastra.ua.ac.be/en/index.html
But of course, that was done with regular $500 cards, not Teslas.
Mind you, if you go and get a tomographic scan today, they already use
fast hardware to do it. Only researchers on limited budgets tolerate
taking days to reduce the data on a desktop PC. And, while the concept
of doing faster processing with a <10KEuro box is attractive in that
environment, I suspect it's a long way from being commercially viable
in that role.
The current tomographic technology (e.g. GE Lightspeed) is pretty
impressive. They slide you in, and 10-15 seconds later, there's 3 d
rendered models and slices on the screen. The equipment is pretty
hassle free, the UI straightforward from what I could see, etc.
And, of course, people are willing (currently) to pay many millions
for a machine to do this. I suspect that the other costs of running a
CT scanner (both capital and operating) overwhelm the cost of the
computing power, so going from a $100K box to a $20K box is a drop in
the bucket. When you're talking MRI, for instance, there's the cost
of the liquid helium for the magnets.
That's a long way from a bunch of grad students racking up a bunch of PCs.
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