|
CUDA, What Is It and What Does It Mean To You?
Jim, I'm a Doctor Not a Programmer:
Obligatory Star Trek reference aside, for those that aren't 1337 h4x0r programmers, Nvidia's CUDA does have things to offer the common user, including a way to help cure cancer.
If you would lke to join the techwarelabs folding at home team,
enter team number "147447" in the folding at home program.
Folding@Home is a distributed computing effort created by Stanford University to help understand protein folding, and in turn understand how certain diseases form. The program they offer takes advantage of idle CPU time (most computers don't fully utilize their CPU at all times). All of the extra processing time not being used is then harnessed to help calculate protein folding. Due to the nature of distributed computing projects, they are ideal for massive amounts of processing cores, something that the GPU has. On August 1, 2008 Stanford (with Nvidia's help) released a CUDA enabled Folding@Home client for use with their new GPU's. Since its release, Nvidia GPU's have contributed more processing power than any other group of processing units (contributing over 1 PetaFLOP of processing power). This has great potential for the medical field and for many other distributed computing efforts that want to harness this kind of power.
| OS Type | Current TFLOPS | Active CPUs | Total CPUs |
| Windows | 208 | 218542 | 2152602 |
| Mac OS X/PowerPC | 7 | 8345 | 119278 |
| Mac OS X/Intel | 21 | 6672 | 60368 |
| Linux | 60 | 35357 | 327844 |
| ATI GPU | 414 | 3766 | 7462 |
| NVIDIA GPU | 1403 | 12758 | 21540 |
| PLAYSTATION 3 | 1236 | 43816 | 590161 |
| Total | 3349 | 329256 | 3279255 |
As of Aug 28, 2008 06:04:43
What about the gamers?:
Some may remember the company Ageia and their PhysX card that claimed to offer realistic physics in games without impacting performance. In February of this year, Nvidia bought out Ageia and with them, their PhysX engine. Now dubbed Nvidia PhysX, it offers all the same features of the old PhysX with one huge advantage. It can be run on any CUDA enabled gaming graphics card, no separate PhysX card required. That means that the only thing you need to enjoy realistic physics in supported games is a supported graphics card and the latest drivers.
Nvidia offers a mod pack for the game Unreal Tournament 3 on their site that acts as a tech demo for PhysX. Some of the features of the levels in the mod pack include:
- Destructible walls, floors, walkways and rooftops
- New weapons which can pull debris towards the target (Lighthouse)
- An amazing Tornado which both destroys the battlefield as the game progresses and pulls weapon projectiles into it's deadly vortex
REALTIME PRICING