[Octopus-devel] [Octopus-notify] svn commit: r3173 - in trunk: liboct src/basic src/species testsuite/finite_systems_2d testsuite/finite_systems_3d by xavier

[Miguel Marques]

  Hi Alberto,

  I just take the opportunity to explain why Xavier's work is quite
important at the moment. In Coimbra we have an informatics student *his
name is Hugo Matos) who will (likely) make his undergraduate thesis in
octopus. The objective is to port octopus to the NVIDIA graphics cards.
As you probably know, NVIDIA made available a SDK for their cards, and
some scientific programs (like Folding  Home) got speedups of 20-30. Yes,
the program ran 20 times faster in the GPU than in the CPU!!!

  The catch is that the current generation of NVIDIA (8) only supports
single precision. They promised that the new GeForce 9 (coming next
years) will also support double precision (let's hope so). So, being
able to compile and run octopus in single precision was fundamental for
Hugo's work.

  As a side note, we bought (in Coimbra) the most expensive NVIDIA card
available. It has arrived, but it requires 650 W of power, and two
special connectors to the power supply. We are waiting for the new power
supply to arrive, so that we can start playing. If any of you would also
like to give it a shot with this graphics card, let me know that we can
get you an account in the machine.

  cheers,
  Miguel

P.S. If this project works, we should start reconsidering the clusters
we want to buy ;))))