October 2, 2009, 9:29 am
I’m heading out to the NVidia GPU Technology Conference this week. Notice that the title does not state whether it is a Video or HPC conference and as a matter of fact it will cover both. This concept fascinates me. Dual use hardware is how the whole cluster thing got started. One difference back then was the pioneers were told, “You can’t do that.” Good thing for us they did not listen. Today, there are many HPC products designed for the cluster market. The reality is, however, as technology gets more expensive to produce the only way to make a profit is to sell large quantities. Designed dual use is a great solution to this problem. I am not talking about pulling things from other markets as it was done in the early days, but rather, products that are specifically designed for two markets — in this case HPC and Video processing.
NVidia is a great model for this approach. Not that long ago, they added some HPC features to their products and created software tools to help people use these new features. They also made sure their products were screaming fast for the video market as well…
