Graphic Cards Using a GPU for General-purpose computing

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When APC asked what Nvidia was doing to make GPU power available for other programs, the company's charismatic chief scientist, David Kirk, took a moment to consider the question carefully.

"We're certainly not making GPUs with general purpose computing in mind," he said. "Our GPUs are engineered to do graphics as fast as possible."

But Kirk admits that in a recent contest to build the world's fastest database server, the winner was a university professor who ported SQL software to run on an Nvidia GPU.

For a company which claims it isn't setting out to beat the Pentium, Nvidia is providing a surprising amount of help to developers to encourage them to write general purpose software that takes advantage of GPU power.

Its new GPU programming guide, GPU Gems 2, includes a whopping 136 pages of details on doing general purpose programming on GPUs.

A long-forgotten Slashdot discussion reveals that the maintainer of the community site dedicated to general purpose computing on GPU units is Mark Harris of Nvidia Corporation, a technical developer relations expert renowned for his research into computer graphics.
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Hehe i got a free copy of gpu gems 2. Its rather interesting but not for someone trying to learn shaders. One of the contributors to that book is my classmate :D. BTW the best site for general gpu progs is www.gpgpu.org. Also the UNC site has a lot of stuff on general purpose computing on gpus including running database queries.
 
Basically anything which can use parallel algorithms is a possible candidate. And parallel databases have been researched for a long time, tho how one cud use the vectoer units of a GPU for it, still is beyond my grasp.
 
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