From: Dave Bayer <bayer@cpw.math.columbia.edu>
Date: April 29, 2008 8:37:24 AM EDT
To: Mike Stillman <mike@math.cornell.edu>
Cc: David Eisenbud <de@msri.org>
Subject: Re: Stream Processing

The mother lode:

       General-Purpose Computation Using Graphics Hardware
       http://www.gpgpu.org/

On Apr 29, 2008, at 8:28 AM, Dave Bayer wrote:

> Mike,
>
> Ever heard of stream processing? Some of the hippest massive  
> computing projects are going that way. I was at an extreme  
> computing meeting at MSRI last fall, and asked about using graphics  
> cards as parallel devices, expecting everyone including the speaker  
> to look at me like I was from Mars. Instead, the speaker simply  
> hadn't mentioned it, they were all over this, for some astronomy  
> computations.
>
> Then Dan Bienstock, in our OR department, was very interested in  
> what I had learned from our "Art of..." book we're reading, the  
> atomic lock-free instructions were news to him even though he's  
> been doing pthreads parallel for years.  But he brought up stream  
> processing as a "back at you!" answer. Cool.
>
> The wikipedia page is rather lame, but a start, with links:
>
> 	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_processing
>
> This link looks promising:
>
> 	http://shallows.sourceforge.net/
>
> Despite the emphasis on floating point, we should wonder what  
> computations we do could use this. Anything in M2? To answer this  
> we need to understand the model, and think creatively about  
> appropriating floating point for other purposes.
>
> What puts this all together for me is a gamer motherboard like
>
> 	DFI LanParty P35-T2R
>
> that seems to nicely support THREE hard core graphics cards on one  
> board, and has the best overclocking specs on the market. It's  
> built to handle the bus traffic.
