cheapish video card for Linux

[Christopher Browne]

On 4/26/06, D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh-pmF8o41NoarQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Some models have 64-bit access to memory and some have 128-bit.  The
> specs are not clear.

There's getting to be some interesting secondary uses for these cards;
they tend to have higher speed memory interfaces than your general
purpose CPU has got,.

http://www.gpgpu.org/

The interesting peer reviewed thing was that a group (including Jim
Gray, one of the database/transaction "famed authors") found that
using GPUs to help do Big Sorts turned out to provide a pretty big
performance boost.

Nifty case that may be somewhat practical to use, as long as you have
a suitable nVidia card (ATI not supported):
http://gamma.cs.unc.edu/GPUSORT/

What is kind of interesting is that this allows us to revisit tape
sort algorithms, that section of Knuth that we all thought was
essentially useless because "nobody uses tape anymore."  (On a similar
note, PostgreSQL 8.2 looks like it will be using a more sophisticated
tape sorting system from Knuth; there has been some talk about
GPUSORT, not that people are ready to trust it, yet...)

Waterloo's CGL has implemented a metaprogramming system for graphics
cards called Sh; see <http://libsh.org/about.html>.

The obvious "wins" relate to graphics, but there are some pretty neat
non-graphical applications.
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