A quick, but good read for some background on this area:

http://www.computer.org/computer/homepage/1003/entertainment

Joshua


On Fri, Nov 21, 2003 at 03:20:02AM -0500, Joshua 'Schwa' Gargus wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I was just jotting some notes on my recollections of Pat Hanrahan's
> talk today at school, and some are relevant to Squeak, so here's the
> lot
> 
> - Talk was entitled "Why are GPUs so fast?"
> 
> - GPUs 2.4x faster each year; trend dates back to SGIs in mid-80s
> 
> - STREAM PROCESSING!!  Put 1000s of floating-point units on chip, and
> keep them fed
> 
> - GPUs would need "surprisingly few" changes to be ideal for
> general-purpose scientific computation
> 
> - Although many problems are not parallelizable, many of the ones that
> max out CPUs today can be re-cast as stream algorithms
> 	- LAPACK-style matrix operations
> 	- Dynamics (cloth, fluid simulation)
> 	- Low-level computer vision (eg: edge detection)
> 	- Statistical pattern recognition (Bayesian/neural nets)
> 
> - "Brook": a stream processing language that they will be making an
> open-source release of.  Compiles down to Cg, GLSlang, or sometimes 
> GPU assembly language.  Hides graphic-centricity of OpenGL, Direct3D.
> 
> 
> This last one got me the most excited.  Up until now, Squeak had to
> jump through hoops to write performance-critical code essentially in C
> via Slang and plugins.  C/C++, on the other hand, wrote performance
> code in their crappy own selves.
> 
> If we write an interface to Brook (I wouldn't imagine it would be tougher
> than the Cg interface I wrote), then Squeak will be on equal footing with
> for using stream hardware to do the heavy computational lifting.
> 
> Good stuff!
> 
> Joshua
>