Using The GPU From JavaScript

July 17, 2017 by Al Williams 50 Comments

Everyone knows that writing programs that exploit the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) in your computer’s video card requires special arcane tools, right? Well, thanks to [Matthew Saw], [Fazil Sapuan], and [Cheah Eugene], perhaps not. At a hackathon, they turned out a Javascript library that allows you to create “kernel” functions to execute on the GPU of the target system. There’s a demo available with a benchmark which on our machine sped up a 512×512 calculation by well over five times. You can download the library from the same page. There’s also a GitHub page.

The documentation is a bit sparse but readable. You simply define the function you want to execute and the dimensions of the problem. You can specify one, two, or three dimensions, as suits your problem space. When you execute the associated function it will try to run the kernels on your GPU in parallel. If it can’t, it will still get the right answer, just slowly.

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80-PIC32 Cluster Does Fractals

December 19, 2016 by Al Williams 26 Comments

One way to get around limitations in computing resources is to throw more computers at the problem. That’s why even cheap consumer-grade computers and phones have multiple cores in them. In supercomputing, it is common to have lots of processors with sophisticated sharing mechanisms.

[Henk Verbeek] decided to take 80 inexpensive PIC32 chips and build his own cluster programmed in — of all things — BASIC. The devices talk to each other via I2C. His example application plots fractals on another PIC32-based computer that has a VGA output. You can see a video of the device in action, below.

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Tote Boards: The Impressive Engineering Of Horse Gambling

November 4, 2015 by Kristina Panos 21 Comments

Horse racing has been around since the time of the ancient Greeks. Often called the sport of kings, it was an early platform for making friendly wagers. Over time, private bets among friends gave way to bookmaking, and the odds of winning skewed in favor of a new concept called the “house”.

During the late 1860s, an entrepreneur in Paris named Joseph Oller invented a new form of betting he called pari-mutuel. In this method, bettors wager among themselves instead of against the house. Bets are pooled together and the winnings divided among the bettors. Pari-mutuel betting creates more organic odds than ones given by a profit-driven bookmaker.

Oller’s method caught on quite well. It brought fairness and transparency to betting, which made it even more attractive. It takes a lot of quick calculations to show real-time bet totals and changing odds, and human adding machines presented a bottleneck. In the early 1900s, a man named George Julius would change pari-mutuel technology forever by making an automatic vote-counting machine in his garage.

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Leveraging The GPU To Accelerate The Linux Kernel

December 14, 2012 by Mike Szczys 58 Comments

Powerful graphics cards are pretty affordable these days. Even though we rarely do high-end gaming on our daily machine we still have a GeForce 9800 GT. That goes to waste on a machine used mainly to publish posts and write code for microcontrollers. But perhaps we can put the GPU to good use when it comes compile time. The KGPU package enlists your graphics card to help the kernel do some heavy lifting.

This won’t work for just any GPU. The technique uses CUDA, which is a parallel computing package for NVIDIA hardware. But don’t let lack of hardware keep you from checking it out. [Weibin Sun] is one of the researchers behind the technique. He posted a whitepaper (PDF) on the topic over at his website.

Add this to the growing list of non-graphic applications for today graphics hardware.

UPDATE: Looks like we won’t be trying this out after all. Your GPU must support CUDA 2.0 or higher. We found ours on this list and it’s only capable of CUDA 1.0.

[Thanks John]

Breadboarding With A 144-core Processor

October 3, 2012 by Mike Szczys 36 Comments

At the center of that green PCB is a tiny little processor with way too many cores. It’s the GA144 which was taken for a test-drive on a breadboard by [Andrew Back]. We saw a multi-core Kickstarter project last month. This will cost a lot less and get you more than twice the number of cores. But as was mentioned in the comments on that post, the drawback is the programming language. This chip’s IDE uses Forth.

There is a dev board available, but [Andrew] went instead with a QFN-to-Through-Hole adapter board which he hand soldered. Once he has access to the pins the chip can be programmed with an FTDI adapter which is compatible with the 1.8V logic levels. The provided Forth IDE (arrayForth) is a Windows only program but it does run under Wine. We followed the project through to see him twiddling I/O pins. But we still have trouble thinking of applications for it. In a world of complex and inexpensive FPGA chips, what would you use this type of processor for?

Massively Parallel Computer Costs $99

September 28, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 89 Comments

Even though dual, quad, and octo-core CPUs have been around for a while, it’s a far cry from truly massive parallel computing platforms. The chip manufacturer Adapteva is looking to put dozens of CPUs in a small package with their Parallella project. As a bonus, they’re looking for funding on Kickstarter, and plan to open source their 16 and 64-core CPUs after funding is complete.

The Parallella computer is based on the ARM architecture, and will be able to run Ubuntu with 1 Gig of RAM, a dual-core ARM A9 CPU, Ethernet, USB, and HDMI output. What makes the Parallella special is it’s Epiphany Multicore Accelerator – a coprocessor containing up to 64 parallel cores.

Adapteva is turning to Kickstarter for their Parallella computer to get the funding to take their Epiphany multicore daughterboard and shrink it down into a single chip. Once that’s complete, Adapteva will start shipping an ARM-powered Linux supercomputer that’s about the size of a credit card, or a Raspberry Pi under the new system of dev board measurements.

With any luck, the Parallella multicore computer will be available for $99, much less than a comparable x86 multicore computer. It’ll certainly be interesting to see what the Parallella can do in the future.