FSI ♥ HPC
3 Apr 2007
Penny Crosman has posted an article on Wall Street & Technology entitled “The High-Speed Arms Race on Wall Street Is Leading Firms to Tap High-Performance Computing” [via InsideHPC]. The article does a great job showing the breadth of architectural choices that might be considered in addressing high-performance computing needs and gives Steve Ballmer plenty of opportunity to talk about how Microsoft is breaking into the scene.
On the other hand, it completely glosses over the incredible difficulty in programming for GPGPU and the IBM-Sony-Toshiba Cell Processor. For giggles, try reading the Programming Guide for NVIDIA CUDA. Once you’re done rolling on the floor, try reading the recent article from Dr Dobbs on “Programming the Cell Processor”, whose subtitle should have been “How We Got 20x Performance Speed-Up By Writing 20x Lines of Code”.
As they say, it’s all fun and games until someone gets an RFP.
