Ask HN: Where else can we use GPU processing?

5 points·uptownhr··9 comments

GPU Processing has become very popular in mining xCoins. Can GPU be used in the web for other use cases? Any examples?

GPUs have been used effectively in implementing graph algorithms. Graph algorithms are tremendously useful and show up all over computing.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.4482

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.220...

I think everyone knows that GPU can be used for visual graphics like gaming and drawing things on a page with webGL. I'm more interested in computational powers like how it's able to compute bitcoin hashes. Are there cases of GPUs being used in other non-graphical computational cases? Like a mongodb/mysql index search?

GPUs are good at parallel processing, so any task that is highly parallelizable can see massive performance improvements through a GPU implementation.

In my field, for example, medical image processing, GPU's are often used on highly computational problems to reduce the time an algorithm or image reconstruction takes.

Here's a wikipedia link; maybe someone else will give a better description http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_computing_on_gr...

Computation Fluid Dynamics, Finite Element Modeling/Analysis, Molecular dynamics, etc.

I have heard of some sites using GPUs for generating dynamic images.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGL

Bioinformatics/Genomics have been beginning to use GPUs for their data processing, since there's vast amount of DNA data that can take a long time to get through.

I believe that GPUs are very good at video processing. Obviously they're also good for a lot of math-heavy tasks, like fluid simulation, light simulation, etc.

for gaming

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