(j3.2006) Liaison to IFIP WG 2.5

[Keith Bierman]

On Aug 21, 2007, at 12:12 PM, Aleksandar Donev wrote:

> On Tuesday 21 August 2007 08:43, Bill Long wrote:
>
>
> Personally, I've wondered if it is possible to do interval FP in an  
> additional
> off-processor unit (like GPUs or FPGAs or some other thing one can  
> add to

typically the communication overhead makes this terribly inefficient  
(graphics are a special case, as there's a ton of operations and the  
primary i/o isn't to the system it's to the special graphics device).

While devices like Clearspeed do make a comeback once in a while  
(recall FPS?) it has proved uneconomic (viz. price/performance is  
poor, and often the pure performance is poor due to bottlenecks) in  
the long run.

Easy to use, reasonably efficient and *sharp* computations require  
close language integration, not a bolt on. And additional hardware  
support is pointless without a way to exploit it.

But as I said, J3 and WG5 spent a lot of time on this in the past. We  
really don't do ourselves any favors by repeating it all (albeit with  
a slightly different cast).

---
Keith H. Bierman   khbkhb at gmail.com
<speaking for myself*> Copyright 2007




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://j3-fortran.org/pipermail/j3/attachments/20070821/a92a0139/attachment-0001.html