Scientific Computing Using Consumer Video-Gaming Hardware Devices

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the potential of consumer video-gaming hardware devices for scientific computing by benchmarking their performance against specialized supercomputing GPGPUs using OpenCL SHOC and Einstein@Home.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive performance comparison of current gaming hardware with traditional supercomputing GPUs for scientific applications.

Findings

Gaming hardware shows promising performance for scientific computing.

Consumer devices are cost-effective alternatives to traditional supercomputers.

Performance varies significantly across different hardware and applications.

Abstract

Commodity video-gaming hardware (consoles, graphics cards, tablets, etc.) performance has been advancing at a rapid pace owing to strong consumer demand and stiff market competition. Gaming hardware devices are currently amongst the most powerful and cost-effective computational technologies available in quantity. In this article, we evaluate a sample of current generation video-gaming hardware devices for scientific computing and compare their performance with specialized supercomputing general purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs). We use the OpenCL SHOC benchmark suite, which is a measure of the performance of compute hardware on various different scientific application kernels, and also a popular public distributed computing application, Einstein@Home in the field of gravitational physics for the purposes of this evaluation.