Re: Multicore-CPU and GPU

On Wed, 25 Jul 2007, leppert, jan wrote:
> First one, is it profitable to use a Dual- or Quad-Core CPU, if you use 
> an single computer to solve problems with mpb/meep?

Yes.  Just use MPI, which supports shared-memory machines.

> Second, will there be an implementation in mbp/meep to use the GPU (for 
> example with CUDA from nvidia) for the simulation and how much would be 
> the profit in simulationtime?

We have no plans to implement Meep on CUDA or any other GPU, at least with 
the current state of the technology.  I have little personal interest in 
card-specific programming for limited low-level architectures.

MPB could potentially benefit more easily, because almost all of its 
performance depends only on FFTW and the BLAS.  For example, if you had a 
BLAS library for CUDA, that would speed things up somewhat (I have no idea 
what the speedup would be).  Currently, GPUs are only for single-precision 
calculations, as far as I know, so you would have to forgo double 
precision.

Steven