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Barney Holmes – my personal blog. Ideas, issues, discoveries. You'll find some posts related to the organisation MindFreedom here as well.

Archive for gpu

Gaming for Evolution

January 19, 2009 at 8:06 pm · Filed under computing, future, futurism, hope, science, star trek, video games and tagged: , , ,

Having studied something about real time systems at college I was always impressed by the ability of 3D games, usually First Person Shooter games to run an environment in realtime. If you think about it it’s actually quite a computing problem to be able to run at often around or above 50fps and keep everything running smoothly and giving the illusion of reality. The early video game pioneers solved the problems in code. As more and more stuff needed to be simulated it became obvious that it is more efficient and sensible to do the calculations needed using dedicated hardware. So we entered the age of the accelerated graphics video card.

The GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) on your card has nothing to do with actually outputting an image. All it is, is a big matrix of specialised calculating circuits that do the maths of locating all the geometry in 3D space as you “move around” in a game. This has had an interesting side effect in the computing world. the GPU’s have basically become the modern version of the “Maths Co Processor” that some PC’s used to come with (I think it’s part of the CPU now). The leverage of the this GPU technology is achieving no small advances. Nvidia recently released their “Tesla” card. It has no video output ! You probably won’t be playing Battlefield on it ! It is hardware purely for doing calculations. These are not your usual calculations. Universites and companies have been using them for what used to be run on “Super Computers”. If you have some of the latest Nvidia (CUDA capable) video cards you actually have a supercomputer in your desktop ! So no need to save up for that Cray anymore.

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Notice the people and car to scale.

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M4 can be deformed every few milliseconds to compensate for atmospheric interference.

The upcoming Very Large Telescope has National Instruments LabVIEW working on the problem of how to stabalise it’s huge mirrors. It is not a trivial problem needing thousands upon thousands of calculations in real time (remember, this is exactly what is happening when you are playing a game). They have been using Dell multi core systems, but they have also been testing the use of GPGPU’s (General Purpose Graphics Processing Units) using Nvidia CUDA technology.

( A couple of Labview employees demonstrate. Double click for source page. The guy on the left reminds me of Chief O’Brien from Star Trek ).

So all that time “wasted” playing those 3D video games. All that hard earned money spent on video cards seems to be partly responsible for some rather major advances and research. So next time your parents complain that you’ve been blasting away with that shotgun too much, just remind them that your doing your bit for humanity. Just don’t tell them I told you to say it.

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How buying a Video Game can help with Climate Change Solutions.

December 14, 2007 at 11:43 pm · Filed under climate change, engineering, global warming, science, technology and tagged: , , , ,

Facetious ? Well, the technology that pushes around all those graphics, your 3D Video Card, is, of course based on a huge calculator. A calculator that has become very powerful because of all those game and associated hardware sales fuelling the research labs of NVidia or ATI.

Here is the micro city that is the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). A city packed with millions of good little citizens carrying out specialised duties.

( NVidia GeForce 6800 GPU. Source: GPU Gems 2, Chapter 30: The GeForce 6 Series GPU Architecture )

This technology can be used for other purposes apart from games. In part due to companies like NVidia opening up the architecture with new coding languages. Think about it. If the GPU can carry out all the calculations for a game, then it can calculate other things as well. It’s just a big calculator ! Well, somewhat specialised towards “linear equations”.

“Every serious PC gamer knows what a difference a good graphics card can make to the fun they have. But it is not just hardcore gamers who have recognised the worth of a PC graphics card. “

( Source: Graphics chips rev up research results, BBC News 24, Friday, 9 November 2007 )

You might have heard of the Seti@Home like, distributed computing projects using your Video Card for things like protein analysis. Now those specialised chips, often running many times as fast as your CPU, are being used to analyse the flow around turbine blades, in one example.

“Improvements of even 1% in fuel consumption, for jet engines, or 1% in electricity power generated, for steam or gas turbines for power generation, is highly sought after.”

( Source: Graphics chips rev up research results, BBC News 24, Friday, 9 November 2007 )

We are currently being bombarded with the desire to cut emissions, but I don’t hear much about how this will happen. Is this why some countries remain intransigent on the issue ? Instead of seeing improved technologies, improved efficiency, and the improved and MORE PROFITABLE industries that would result from the challenge of climate change, we get endless moaning about “threatened economies”. What tripe ! Look at the challenge of the Moon Shots that boosted various industries for years. With these “lateral thinking” approaches that involve the mathematics of improving engine efficiencies through using 3D Video Card technology, and other approaches, we could see massive cuts, across the board on emissions. It will take time. How long does it take for new turbine technology to come in ? I don’t know.

More so, what about things that are increasing our understanding of physics ? Again powered by huge simulations of atom smashers, physics models and other simulations. Of couse powered by those Video Cards and other computer technologies. What if there were some breakthrough in cheap fuel technology ? Electricity generating technology ? Anything could happen that might be taken up quickly.

I see this big scrap over Climate Change. Is the dust obscuring what we’re good at ? Very good at in fact. Ingenuity. Looking for the solutions to problems.

Barney

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