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>NVidia Titan GPU : it is a relatively cheap, massively parallel GPU Relatively cheap compared to having to build clusters, perhaps, but $1000 isn't cheap for
by idle_processor 13y ago
>NVidia Titan GPU : it is a relatively cheap, massively parallel GPU
Relatively cheap compared to having to build clusters, perhaps, but $1000 isn't cheap for a desktop computing GPU.
A mid-high tier card (GeForce GTX 770) is closer to $400. A mid-range gaming card (GTX 760) is closer to $260.
Those finding the topic link interesting may also be interested in this CUDA radix sorting article[0] from 2010, as it featured "one billion 32-bit keys sorted per second."
[0] https://code.google.com/p/back40computing/wiki/RadixSorting https://code.google.com/p/back40computing/wiki/RadixSorting
- dragontamer 13y agoI'm inclined to believe that this sort of thing is memory-limited. Its probably less important for a Titan-class GPU to be used... rather... its more important that a super-wide GDDR5 RAM is used to store the records on. The problem with GTX770 / GTX760 is that their double-precision performance is gimped by NVidia. AMD cards are better at that price range for general purpose compute (which is why AMD cards are almost always used for BTC mining: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/153467-amd-destroys-nvidia-bitcoin-mining http://www.extremetech.com/computing/153467-amd-destroys-nvi...) Anyway, sorting and searching are all memory-constrained problems. GPUs have significantly faster RAM with significantly more bandwidth than CPUs. Hopefully DDR4 fixes the problem... but that isn't going to come for another year or two.
- jd007 13y agoHe's probably talking about professional line of graphics cards (e.g. Tesla), where $1k is considered quite cheap. Titan is the first consumer oriented card by nVidia that can be used as a pro-grade card (no throttling on compute tasks) so maybe that's what the OP was talking about. Of course for gaming the Titan is not considered cheap at all.