TGDaily: The most powerful computing device in your PC may not be that dual-core processor, but your average graphics card. Interest in tapping the hidden processing power in graphics processor has been growing over the past two years, but Peakstream is the first company to actually offer a solution to create a supercomputer based on graphics cards.

Peakstream claims that it has developed a new software platform that can create supercomputers by combining the processing capability of common CPUs with the resources of modern graphics cards. Simply by adding the horsepower of graphics cards to an existing computer, the company claims that the original system can be accelerated by a factor of 20x.

Compared to graphics processors, main system processors have developed much slower in providing an increase in floating point performance. For example, a Pentium 4 3 GHz processor was estimated to reach about 6 GFLOPs (billion operations per second), while Woodcrest, the server variant of Intel's Core 2 Duo processor, is currently believed to top out at around 24 GFLOPs; according to Intel, a four-processor dual-core Itanium 2 system recently reached 45 GFLOPs.

Read more...