Scientific computing using consumer video-gaming embedded devices

Abstract

The performance of commodity video-gaming embedded devices (consoles, graphics cards, tablets, etc.) has been advancing at a rapid pace owing to strong consumer demand and stiff market competition. Gaming 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 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.