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IDL User Group Meeting Huge Success: Correction [message #63006]

Fri, 17 October 2008 13:55

David Fanning
Messages: 11724
Registered: August 2001

Senior Member

Folks,

I wrote in my User Group Meeting review yesterday:

> Peter Messmer continues to up the performance
> of GPULib, using graphical processors to increase computationally
> expensive operations from 20-100%.

Unfortunately, I got this wrong. The numbers are not 20-100
*percent*, but 20-100 *times* as fast!! Someone who knows
more about this than I do, had this to say:

The GPULib performance improvements described by Peter Messmer
from Tech-X Corp are on the order of 20 to 100 *times* (versus
percent). If you take this a step further and write custom
kernels using the NVIDIA CUDA library directly, you can achieve
results many times even this remarkable number. GPU processing
has the potential to open up an entire universe of problem sets
that researchers would not have even considered up until now
because the computations would have otherwise required
supercomputing time.

I understand Mort Canty tried this on a PCA analysis on just
a regular run-of-the-mill graphics card and found a 17 *times*
improvement in performance. When you are working with large
satellite images, as I am, this gets your heart beating a
little faster. The 100% numbers Peter was talking about came,
as I understand it, on high-end graphics processors that cost
in the neighborhood of $1500. Not very much to pay for near-
supercomputer processing power.

Sorry for the confusion.

Cheers,

David
--
David Fanning, Ph.D.
Fanning Software Consulting, Inc.
Coyote's Guide to IDL Programming: http://www.dfanning.com/
Sepore ma de ni thui. ("Perhaps thou speakest truth.")

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[Message index]

		IDL User Group Meeting Huge Success: Correction By: David Fanning on Fri, 17 October 2008 13:55
		Re: IDL User Group Meeting Huge Success By: ed.schmahl on Fri, 17 October 2008 09:36
		Re: IDL User Group Meeting Huge Success By: jeffnettles4870 on Fri, 17 October 2008 08:02
		Re: IDL User Group Meeting Huge Success By: fburton on Fri, 17 October 2008 05:17
		Re: IDL User Group Meeting Huge Success By: vino on Fri, 17 October 2008 05:10
		Re: IDL User Group Meeting Huge Success By: Mort Canty on Fri, 17 October 2008 01:17

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