English

Scientific Computing Using Consumer Video-Gaming Hardware Devices

Computational Physics 2016-09-14 v1 Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing Emerging Technologies Performance

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1607.05537,
  title  = {Scientific Computing Using Consumer Video-Gaming Hardware Devices},
  author = {Glenn Volkema and Gaurav Khanna},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.05537},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

8 pages, 6 figures; includes benchmark results on common scientific computing kernels

R2 v1 2026-06-22T14:58:24.277Z