First Larrabee Chip Canceled

December 7, 2009

Looks like the first stand-alone Larrabee chip has been canceled.


A Survey Of Programming Video Cards For Other Purposes

August 3, 2009

The August 2009 issue of ;login: from USENIX has a nice article on programming video cards by Tim Kaldewey entitled “Programming Video Cards For Database Applications”. Sadly, the article is only available to USENIX members until August of 2010.

Kaldewey surveys the past and present of programming video cards for non-graphics purposes – from the early days of using the graphics APIs to fool the GPU into thinking it is rendering graphics when it is really performing a general-purpose calculation, to the present era of general-purpose APIs such as CUDA.

He also shows a back-of-the-envelope calculation for building out a 100 teraflop data center using 100 GPUs versus 1400 CPUs, including power consumption differences.

If you are a USENIX member, the article is a good read. Sadly, it won’t be current when it finally becomes freely available.

[The same issue of ;login: also has a nice article by Leo Meyerovich: “Rethinking Browser Performance“.]


Multicore Video Cards (Again)

February 16, 2009

I’ve previously posted on the topics of CUDA and Larrabee. I continue to be intrigued by the possibilities that open up as multi-core GPU programming becomes available. For applications that need many threads this should present interesting opportunities. Why bother struggling to run your parallel application in the meager 4 or 8 cores of your CPU when you can offload the work to 32 cores?

Read the rest of this entry »


Parallel Rule Engines: What About Your Video Card?

November 15, 2008

While I’m on the subject of Dr. Charles Forgy’s talk at ORF 2008

Has anybody tried to compile CLIPS under CUDA?

We know from ORF that Dr. Forgy is working on a 4-core machine with his parallel version of OPS/J. I’m curious to see the same ideas applied to 32+ core video cards such as the CUDA architecture and the upcoming Larrabee.