The Return of the Vector Processor

“Let me explain. My previous opinion of GP-GPU computing was
certainly positive and I could see it changing the HPC game in some
corners. Users were reporting fantastic speed-ups in some areas,
new users could experiment with existing video cards, and the
larger video market was going to keep the cost down. There were,
however, some fundamental issues expressed by many of the more
traditional HPC users. Until they were resolved, I assumed these
issues would limit just how far GPU computing could go in the HPC
world. Based on the Fermi technical material I have read, Nvidia
has been listening and many of these issues have been addressed
head-on. I predict this device and others like it will change the
HPC landscape, but first a few details about the Fermi
architecture.

One concern voiced by Michael Feldman of HPCwire was the lack of
ECC memory. This opinion combined with a recent University of
Toronto/Google paper on DRAM Errors in the Wild: A Large-Scale
Field Study point to the need for ECC in the data center. (As an
aside, I’ll have more to say on this topic in the coming months. I
have been rigorously testing non-ECC systems and I find some of
them quite robust.) Nvidia has been listening to the market and one
of the new features offered by Fermi is support for ECC memory.
This new feature is not an afterthought as ECC protection extends
down from DRAM to L2 and L1 caches, shared memory, and register
files. Scratch that one off the list.”

Complete
Story