Friday, October 17, 2008

A super-computer in your desktop

Today i decided to spend sometime and get NVIDIA CUDA working on my desktop machine ( A quad Intel Q6600@2.40GHz. with 8 GB of Ram running in 64bit mode)
I had worked with CUDA about a year ago, when it was at the early beta stage but things have moved on a lot since then.
Setting my GeForce 8800 GT on Ubuntu 8.04 took a bit longer than "usual" due to the fact that 8.04 is not supported "out of the box"
Luckily there are some very detailed pages that helped and in less than an hour, CUDA example programs were happily running.
The GeForce 8800 GT is rated at 350+ GFLOPS which is pretty impressive (consider that Cray-2 could do a "meager" 1.9 GFLOPS)
The only problem (as with a lot of the hardware these days) is that there is very little software to take advantage of it.
My reason of getting CUDA to work is to explore the possibilities of accelerating various pieces of code/applications i am interested in.
Echo canceling (OSLEC for example) and transcoding for asterisk, are high on the list and based on the experience i had of porting asterisk to an FPGA there could be some very interesting results.

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