PeakStream Is Extraordinarily Serious Runtime for HPC
By Edward J. Correia
October 1, 2006 —
(Page 1 of 2)
PeakStream is not about playing games. But the new company has its eye on IBM’s Cell processor and high-speed graphics processor units, even though those circuits are being used today mainly to run entertainment software.
Former executives of Sun Microsystems, VMware and Nvidia, the graphics accelerator chip maker, have joined to form PeakStream Inc. Flush with US$17 million in Series B funding, the company in September unveiled the PeakStream Platform, a runtime solution for high-performance computing that it claims abstracts the complexities and pitfalls of programming for multiple processors or cores while improving application performance by more than twentyfold.
The all-software solution includes the PeakStream Server, which installs on top of an Intel-based machine with an optional board containing one or more graphics processor units (GPUs). “This is substantial technology that allows you to run an application on top of a graphics processor,” said Matt Papakipos, PeakStream’s CTO and former architecture lead with Nvidia.
An evaluation version for Linux was set to be released on Sept 18; general availability is scheduled before the end of this year. Pricing is set at $2,000 per server.
Papakipos said that to take advantage of the PeakStream APIs, a developer need only include the appropriate PeakStream libraries in new or existing C/C++ apps. “A virtual machine provides an abstraction layer on multiple types of CPUs and GPUs so code can execute anywhere,” he said. Initial VMs will support Cell, multicore 32- and 64-bit Xeon and ATI GPUs (now owned by AMD). “This is the magic of the technology; apps can run anywhere with no rewrite,” Papakipos claimed, adding that the VM handles matrix math, core math, signal processing and user-developed intrinsics.
After reviewing a PeakStream white paper, Steven Wallach, a supercomputer designer and consultant to Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, said he believes the technology has potential. “For a certain limited set of applications, they could probably see significant increases,” in performance, he said, provided they’re 32-bit apps performing lots of floating-point operations. “GPUs are 32-bit, single-precision processors,” he said.
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