Peeps
This post relates to emerging technologies that look promising for new data-reduction capabilities for astroimages (both amatuer and professional).
It maybe that some of you have been aware of the possibility of using a graphics card to do solve problems other than those of its originally intended purpose of rendering graphics for demanding gamesters - but I've stumbled on this over the last three days and its rocked me with its potential for the amateur (and professional) astroimager etc.
I perused the lecture / presentation videos of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton and I came across the (second) link below - but please read this overview lest you think its a complete tanget:
Consider a Cray-X-MP (1984) - a supercomputer performing 800 MFLOPS (800 million floating point operations per second).
A top end Nvidia CUDA-enabled graphics card used as a co-processor (just plug it in) can now well beat this. In fact I think you can get well into the GFLOPS (10^9).
Of course supercomputers have also moved on (PetaFLOPS - 10^15) - but not at any reasonable multiple of commodity cost)
I can see this re-use of a commodity product (as a highly parallel co-processor to perform certain data-reduction tasks for astroimaging) rolling out to amteurs over the near future. A graphics card can do sophisticated interpolation, and things such as Lucy-Richardson deconvolution, denoising, PSF matching (allowing accurate photometry/astrometry) of faint undersampled images, faster then the host processor on a desktop. I have seen a few references to some of these applications on the "CUDA Zone":
www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home.html#
The development SDKs compiler etc is free.
Nvidia Overview of CUDA Prestented to the IAS:
video.ias.edu/webfm_send/783
The left icon lets you download it if you prefer - or you can stream by clicking the "Hi-Res" or "Low-Res" link.
You can search the site for CUDA and GPU and obatin more information.
You can search for CUDA + N-Body, for example, youtube to see some wonderful simulations. Note this isn't rendering its modelling.
I wont be delving anytime soon - but I see interesting things arising from this.
Mark
  