| leo-j said: Yes as if any of you know wtf your talking about. I can garunte 90% of you are pulling everything out of you a##. |
"Which applications are best suited to Stream Computing?
Applications best suited to stream computing possess two fundamental characteristics:
A high degree of arithmetic computation per system memory fetch
Computational independence — arithmetic occurs on each processing unit without needing to be checked or verified by or with arithmetic occurring on any other processing unit.
Examples include:
Engineering — fluid dynamics
Mathematics — linear equations, matrix calculations
Simulations — Monte Carlo, molecular modeling, etc.
Financial — options pricing
Biological — protein structure calculations
Imaging — medical image processing"
What is stream computing?
Stream computing (or stream processing) refers to a class of compute problems, applications or tasks that can be broken down into parallel, identical operations and run simultaneously on a single processor device. These parallel data streams entering the processor device, computations taking place and the output from the device define stream computing.
Today, stream computing is primarily the realm of the graphics processor unit (GPU) where the parallel processes used to produce graphics imagery are used instead to perform arithmetic calculations.
Characteristics of stream computing:
- Enable new applications on new architectures
- Parallel problems other than graphics that map well on GPU architecture
- Transition from fixed function to programmable pipelines
- Various proof points in research and industry under the name GPGPU
How does stream computing differ from computation on the CPU?
Stream computing takes advantage of a SIMD methodology (single instruction, multiple data) whereas a CPU is a modified SISD methodology (single instruction, single data); modifications taking various parallelism techniques into account.
The benefit of stream computing stems from the highly parallel architecture of the GPU whereby tens to hundreds of parallel operations are performed with each clock cycle whereas the CPU can at best work only a small handful of parallel operations per clock cycle.
Tease.
