AMD pioneers Stream Computing on Graphics Processor Units (GPUs)

Stream computing allows AMD’s ATI graphics processors to accelerate complex computations working in concert with today's high-performance, low-latency CPUs. Along with leading companies and academic institutions worldwide, AMD is working to build a stream computing ecosystem, one that delivers the performance, applications, software and tools necessary to turn AMD's vision into reality.

Fortune 1000 companies, leading software developers, and academic institutions are demonstrating today that stream computing is the key to tremendous performance in a number of applications.

What is Stream Computing
Stream computing harnesses the tremendous processing power of graphic processors for high performance, data-intensive computing in a wide range of scientific, business and consumer applications, providing organizations the ability to process massive amounts of information in significantly less time.

Stream Computing Applications
The accelerated processing associated with stream computing has implications for a number of fields now and in the future, as the ecosystem around stream computing matures:

Life sciences & scientific research
Today AMD's stream computing efforts are helping to save lives by driving life sciences to produce results faster in areas such as disease research, giving organizations the opportunity to do more granular studies in the same amount of time as in the past. Stanford University uses a new distributed computing application, Folding@Home, that takes advantage of AMD processors for disease research. To learn more about how ATI products support disease research at Stanford University, click here.

Future applications include climate research where analysis of large data sets for storm and hurricane forecasting can be done faster or in more detail, potentially resulting in the issuing of severe weather warnings far in advance, and ultimately resulting in a better understanding of the world's climate.

Enterprise Applications
Stream Computing is being used in a wide range of enterprise compute-intensive enterprise applications to deliver increased return on R&D investment and to ultimately improve profitability for the organization. Enterprises in financial services, manufacturing, energy (oil & gas), content creation, mining, construction, and defense, and governments will greatly benefit from the power of AMD’s stream computing products.

Major institutions have been using server farms to do risk assessment using Monte Carlo simulations, and for derivatives pricing using models like Black-Scholes. Simulations conducted by PeakStream, Inc. using AMD hardware shows that stream computing can provide these companies with more detailed answers in significantly less time, letting them make faster business decisions, and giving them a competitive advantage. Simulated processing of risk assessment models similar to those used by financial institutions' were completed 16 times faster than traditional methods (1)

Oil and gas companies are using stream computing to analyze more data in shorter periods of time to more quickly and reliably discover where resources lie, speeding discoveries of crude oil deposits. ATI graphic processors on PeakStream's software platform are allowing oil and gas companies to achieve 20 times faster seismic data modeling (1).

In homeland security, communications analysis and facial recognition can be drastically improved using stream computing, with implications for airport security, as well as photograph and video analysis.

For web search companies with incredibly large databases to organize and sort through, stream computing may offer a compelling business case providing increased processing power in less space.

Consumer Applications
Software used by millions of people around the world, such as operating systems, office applications, and graphics applications, can benefit from stream computing. Any graphics-laden software that requires heavy processing can be accelerated.

In video games, an area where ATI Radeon processors are already heavily used for graphics purposes, stream computing is used in realistic physics, resulting in life-like modeling of hair, cloth, smoke, liquid, and giving gamers the most immersive experience possible. To learn more about AMD’s physics processing thru ATI Radeon graphics products, click here .

(1) Based on simulations performed by PeakStream, Inc. using traditional processing models vs. using AMD’s ATI processors.