tcpip: (Default)
[personal profile] tcpip
Saturday spent some time down in docklands with many other geeks and nerds for the annual Linux Users of Victoria Penguin Picnic. Chris Samuel brought along a pétanque set which was quite fun. On a related topic (and following my assignment for Innovation Management) I've made a few brief remarks concerning the future of the GPGPU. Also, after three years in development, Drupal 7 has been released. Which means if you have any Drupal 5 sites around there's no more security patches in development.

Gave the address at the Unitarian Church on Sunday on Wikileaks: The Free and Responsible Search for Truth, making comparisons with an atrocity exhibition of twentieth century lies and the idea that truth itself is the highest loyalty above sectional and partisan interests. Was approached by some people afterwards who wanted to discuss "the conspiracy" of the suppression of creationism, weather control and the like. The address follows a 'blog on the recent PEW survey which showed that atheists are usually better informed with religious doctrine that church-goers. The advantage, in my option, is that conservative organised religion (ignorant, dangerous and organised) has a community - a power which liberal-religious people and their atheist allies often overlook.

Played Toon on the weekend and everyone quite enjoyed the spirit of the game, immediately grasping the beauty that is cartoon physics. Have started a "Young Gods" story, where the protagonists are polytheist era demigods seeking to overcome cultural biases in favour of universals. First scenario will explore the possibility of Atenism. Neglected to mention how much I enjoyed Michael B's birthday drinks in last post; especially his fine collection of gamer friends.

re:GPUs

Date: 2011-01-17 05:35 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] loic.livejournal.com
Well, FWIW, I was messing around implementing mandelbrot set rendering in my GPU and discovered it only does single precision floating point - 32bit on Nvidia, 24bit on ATI. We've got a ways to go before our GPUs are ready for general purpose computation.

I know that the OpenCL language supports double precision mathematics, but I don't know if that's efficiently implemented for consumer GPUs.

Re: GPUs

Date: 2011-01-17 06:04 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] tcpip.livejournal.com
The lack of software development is driving me nuts :)

In 2008-09 we had a team of students test GPUs for various scientific applications, including NAMD, MATLAB, HOOMD, AutoDock, and GROMACS. In each of the applications tested, an acceleration improvement was noted ranging from 3.7x (MATLAB), to 35x HOOMD.

These improvements were limited however to those particular functions that had been written for GPUs within each application.

As you say, we've got ways to go...

Profile

tcpip: (Default)
Diary of a B+ Grade Polymath

August 2025

S M T W T F S
     12
34 56789
101112 131415 16
17 181920212223
24252627282930
31      

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Aug. 21st, 2025 09:38 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios