[CAnet - news] Stream Computing - the next revolutionary step in Grid computing?

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[Excerpts From HPCwire.com article - BSA]

  
  ATI has announced that it is pioneering a new technology known as 
  stream computing, which has the potential to dramatically impact 
  almost every sector of the market. Along with leading companies and 
  academic institutions worldwide, ATI is working to build a stream 
  computing ecosystem..

  Stream computing makes use of ATI's graphics processors that have 
  until now, been used solely to calculate and render millions of pixels 
  onto computer monitors, hundreds of times each second. Stream 
  computing harnesses that processing power for a wide range of 
  scientific, business and consumer computing applications, providing 
  organizations the ability to process incredible amounts of information 
  in significantly less time. 
  
  Stream computing allows ATI graphics processors (GPUs) to work in 
  concert with today's high performance, low-latency computer processors 
  to solve complex computational problems. Using stream computing, in 
  simulations today processing of risk assessment models similar to 
  those used by financial institutions' were completed 16 times faster 
  than traditional methods, oil and gas companies are seeing seismic 
  model processing increased by more than 20 times, and Stanford 
  University is seeing disease research accelerated by as much as 40 
  times, giving them the ability to process three years worth of 
  research data in just one month. 

In a 2004 paper, titled GPU Cluster for High Performance Computing 
  <http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~vislab/papers/GPUcluster_SC2004.pdf>, the 
  authors state:
  
  "Driven by the game industry, GPU performance has approximately 
  doubled every 6 months since the mid-1990s, which is much faster than 
  the growth rate of CPU performance that doubles every 18 months on 
  average (Moore's law), and this trend is expected to continue. This is 
  made possible by the explicit parallelism exposed in the graphics 
  hardware. As the semiconductor fabrication technology advances, GPUs 
  can use additional transistors much more efficiently for computation 
  than CPUs by increasing the number of pipelines."
  
  At last Friday's announcement, ATI CEO David Orton, without revealing 
  a specific roadmap, suggested that their graphics engine architecture 
  would be further enhanced to benefit both traditional graphics 
  workloads and general stream processing. Their current GPUs achieve 
  about a third of a teraflop; the next generation is expected to reach 
  a half a teraflop.
    
  The company is working with AMD to develop a co-processing platform 
  based on AMD's Torrenza initiative, a standardized socket solution 
  that enables chip vendors to connect their hardware directly to AMD 
  processors through the company's HyperTransport interface.
  
  Recognizing the value that accelerated processing holds for businesses 
  around the world, ATI announced initiatives around enterprise stream 
  computing, dedicated to driving commercial adoption of stream 
  computing, initially targeting the $9 billion high performance 
  computing market. Along with software platform provider PeakStream, 
  Inc., ATI is working to address the technical computing demands of 
  energy, financial, defense and research organizations around the 
  world, to give them the ability to arrive at detailed answers in 
  significantly less time in order to make faster, better informed 
  business decisions.
  
  Enterprise stream computing has the potential to affect a number of 
  sectors including finance, oil and gas, and defense among others. 
  Using ATI processors running on the PeakStream Platform, it's possible 
  for financial institutions to accelerate Monte Carlo simulations used 
  for risk assessment by as much as 16 times. In the oil and gas 
  industry, enterprise stream computing is helping companies to more 
  quickly determine where they should drill to find resource deposits. 
  ATI hardware running on the PeakStream Platform accelerates the 
  processing of seismic models by as much as 20 times. 
  
    Scientific research - Today ATI's stream computing efforts are helping 
  to save lives by driving life sciences to produce results faster in 
  areas such as disease research, giving organizations the option to do 
  more granular studies in the same amount of time as in the past. 
  Stanford University will make available a new distributed computing 
  application that takes advantage of ATI processors for disease 
  research. In the future, climate research may also benefit from stream 
  computing as analysis of large data sets for storm and hurricane 
  forecasting can be done faster or in more detail, potentially 
  resulting in the issuing of warnings longer in advance of severe 
  weather, and ultimately a better understanding of the world's climate. 
  

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