platform for number crunching

[Shlomi Fish]

On Wednesday 16 Jun 2010 16:29:58 Oleg Goldshmidt wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 1:23 PM, Shimon Panfil <info at industrialphys.com> 
wrote:
> > Hi folks,
> > I'm looking for affordable workstation for heavy number crunching, not
> 
> What's "affordable" and what is "heavy number crunching"?
> 
> For most large-scale scientific/engineering number-crunching physical
> parallelism (multiple CPUs/cores) is important for performance. Will
> you benefit from many more than 4 cores? Will anything more than
> commodity 4 core desktop be prohibitively expensive? Will you benefit
> / can you afford, e.g., a CUDA-based number-cruncher under your desk?
> 

CUDA is a proprietary Nvidia technology. Nvidia has been incredibly hostile to 
open-source and Linux. See for example:

http://www.petitiononline.com/nvfoss/

We should not support hang-vidia with our wallet by writing code that can only 
effectively run on their cards. Instead one should use OpenCL that is an open 
standard which is supported fine by ATI cards and hopefully will soon have an 
open-source implementation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish
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