The main advantage of a pre-loaded OS...

[William O'Higgins Witteman]

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 06:09:21PM -0500, Christopher Browne wrote:

>And there's a server-relevant side to this, as well.
>
>Amazon's EC2 service is renting this out as service.
>http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/
>
>Look for:
>   "Cluster GPU Quadruple Extra Large Instance"
>
>What they notably include, GPU-wise, is:
>   2 x NVIDIA Tesla “Fermi” M2050 GPUs
>
>They characterize this as being for "high performance rendering
>needs," but there are likely other use cases possible, and if this
>sort of thing takes off, it certainly offers NVIDIA an expanded market
>in server deployments where they generally have had *no* real place
>thus far.

I read this[1] post a few months ago that mentioned using GPUs for a
sorting algorithm, achieving sorting rates of 482 million fixed-length 
key-value pairs per second.  Being able to offload hash-based sorts of
this kind of magnitude will become more and more useful in big-data
situations or highly parallel processing tasks.  It's not a problem I've
got today, but it might be one I have tomorrow.

[1] http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/12/16/GPGPUSorting.aspx
-- 

yours,

William

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