[PLUG] CUDA programming for tight loop - any game programmers here?

Keith Lofstrom keithl at gate.kl-ic.com
Mon Mar 4 20:30:59 UTC 2013


Does anyone here know how to program the numerical array processors
(shading engines, etc) on high-end graphics cards?  nVidia provides
a "zero-cost-but-not-open" language, CUDA, which can be used to
program these teraflop cards, but the learning curve is steeper
than I can manage alone.

I am looking at radio sidelobe patterns for my "open technology"
server sky project, and discovered that emitter swarms shaped
like flattened geodesic spheres have some remarkable properties. 
You can see a cheesy demo here:

http://server-sky.com/gsr02-link

Just downloading and displaying the flash video will max your CPU. 
It took more than 4 hours to compute, and a full scale map
( 1000x1000 km ) with a full size array ( 30,000 thinsats ) would
take 6 weeks per frame on a 3GHz Pentium.  The core of the loop is
six lines of code, with 3 multiplies, 6 adds, a sin() and a cos().
So you can see why I would like to compute a tad bit faster ...

I figure a game programming guru would be great for this.  There
are a few hundred members of the Portland Indie Game Squad:
http://pigsquad.com/

Surprisingly, I don't recognize any names.  Any "crossovers" in
PIGS and PLUG on this list?

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993



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