Sunday, December 21, 2008

the road ahead


my plans for using the ZMachine for scientific work include:

  • porting some serious hydrodynamics to cuda. maybe PPM or symmetric high-order Kourganov schemes. it's not clear if I should use fortran bindings or switch to c/c++. (fortran would be soo cool and easy :-)

  • run 3D, variable resolution simulations of disk-planet interaction. study formation of extrasolar planets.

  • learn openGL and use it for visualization, especially of 3D flow lines.

  • create particle codes to study dust disks in extrasolar planetary systems

  • etc.






some of the challanges:

  • porting some serious hydrodynamics to cuda. :-)

  • using those 16kB of shared mem skillfully

  • using single precision as much as possible: double precision isn't a strong suit of cuda.

  • multi-gpu computing

  • clustering with MPI (no urge to do it right now! actually ma be a bad idea at all)

  • prevailing over the ruthless Amdahls law



cudak_1 (as I now tend to call the machine, cudak = eccentric/geek in Polish) may soon have siblings cudak_2 & cudak_3, using i7 nehalems, and x58 mo-bo's asus P6T6. I'm currently (Jan 09) waiting for parts, incl. three evga gtx 295.
watch this space, it should be interesting & v. challenging - 6 gpus in one cudak (read: heterogeneous computing).

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