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Geek Vacation Day #3: Black Holes and Swag

When do you know that something is truly mainstream? When there’s a “____ for Dummies” book for it. Apparently cluster computing has hit that mark. I found this at GTC. Platform Computing were giving them out at their booth. I guess if you factor in Azure and E2C into the equation then clusters are really a commodity item.

The book still scares me.

Enough of the swag… I went to three really good talks today on n-body modeling of clusters and black holes. Don’t worry I’m not going to bore you with the details, suffice to say that they had some very pretty videos.

Wednesday’s sessions also highlighted the two ends of the GPGPU development spectrum. In the morning I attended a tools session discussing higher level frameworks, like Thrust, The afternoon’s session on optimization covered very low level aspects, for example enabling pinned memory buffers on the host to allow DMA to the CUDA device.