On Monday 23 June 2008 17:44, Bogdan Costescu wrote: > On Wed, 18 Jun 2008, Prentice Bisbal wrote: > > The biggest hindrance to doing "real" work with GPUs is the lack of > > dual-precision capabilities. > > I think that the biggest hindrance is a unified API or language for > all these accelerators (taking into account not only the GPUs !). Many > developers are probably scared that their code depends on the whim of > the accelerator producer in terms of long-term compatibility of the > source code with the API or language or of the binary code with the > available hardware; sure, you can't prevent the hardware being > obsoleted or the company from going out of bussiness, but if you're > only one recompilation away it's manageable. > > At the last week's ISC'08, after the ATI/AMD and NVidia talks, someone > asked a NVidia guy about any plans of unification with at least > ATI/AMD on this front and the answer was "we're not there yet"... > while the ATI/AMD presentation went on to say "we learnt from mistakes > with our past implementations and we present you now with OpenCL" - > yet another way of programming their GPU... > > I see this situation very similar to the SSE vs. 3Dnow of some years > ago or the one before MPI came to replace all the proprietary > communication libraries. Anybody else shares this view ?
Most certainly! We're looking at all these exciting technologies (gpu, cell, etc.) but all these programming difficulties are definitely holding us back. A standardised solution like mpi would be great. There is a second outcome though - one of the manufacturers gets a virtual monopoly. (and my guess is it will be the manufacturer with the latest chip technology and closest integration with the processor ;-) -- Mattijs Janssens _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
