Why aren't we programming on the GPU???

Posted by Chris on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Chris
Published on 2010-04-03T00:06:26Z Indexed on 2010/04/03 0:13 UTC
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GPGPU

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gpu-programming

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cuda

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Performance

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parallel-processing

So I finally took the time to learn CUDA and get it installed and configured on my computer and I have to say, I'm quite impressed!

Here's how it does rendering the Mandelbrot set at 1280 x 678 pixels on my home PC with a Q6600 and a GeForce 8800GTS (max of 1000 iterations):

Maxing out all 4 CPU cores with OpenMP: 2.23 fps

Running the same algorithm on my GPU: 104.7 fps

And here's how fast I got it to render the whole set at 8192 x 8192 with a max of 1000 iterations:

Serial implemetation on my home PC: 81.2 seconds

All 4 CPU cores on my home PC (OpenMP): 24.5 seconds

32 processors on my school's super computer (MPI with master-worker): 1.92 seconds

My home GPU (CUDA): 0.310 seconds

4 GPUs on my school's super computer (CUDA with static domain decomposition): 0.0547 seconds

So here's my question - if we can get such huge speedups by programming the GPU instead of the CPU, why is nobody doing it??? I can think of so many things we could speed up like this, and yet I don't know of many commercial apps that are actually doing it.

Also, what kinds of other speedups have you seen by offloading your computations to the GPU?

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