Using Standard Hardware Accelerators To Decrease Computation Times In Scientific Applications

Abstract

Nowadays, general-purpose processors are being used in scientific computing. However, whenhigh computational throughput is needed, it’s worth to think it over if dedicated hardwaresolutions would be more efficient, either in terms of performance (or performance to price ratio),or in terms of power efficiency, or both. This paper describes them briefly and comparesto contemporary general-purpose processors’ architecture.

Keywords

• general-purpose processors; standard accelerators; computation accelerators; dedicated architectures; custom computing; GPGPU; Cell; ClearSpeed