Unlikely or totally off-beat use of CUDA?

Accelerated Computing CUDA CUDA Programming and Performance
1

Hi,

nowadays engineers and hobbyists alike seem to be flocking towards CUDA - I am wondering if anyone has found any completely new uses for the GPU that typically one would not normally consider putting on a GPU - applications that one would even consider unlikely (sometimes ridiculous) - unless proven that it actually works.

Recently one made a suggestion to implement (accelerate) a firewall on the GPU. Hmm… .unlikely. Unless someone proves it wrong. Is it possible to do Berkeley Packet Filtering (BPF) rules efficiently on the GPU?

Can the GPU be used to do software defined radio - like for example decoding the entire FM band for audio signals? Given that the A/D conversion part is solved separately…

However the more interesting things are: What totally off-beat stuff HAS already been implemented in CUDA. Any pointers, links … or just concepts?

I’d love to hear everone’s opinion

Christian

2

On the CUDA Zone on the NVIDIA page you can find lots of commercial applications, scientific papers, etc. The most ‘strange’ one until now has been a chess engine I think.

But for me, I would have not dared to do anything on GPU using what was available before CUDA.

3

That sounds pretty interesting. Not that I know anything about radio, but it sounds cool.

The rest, I dunno. Wish I knew! Good thread idea btw.

4

One more non-obvious use case came to my mind. Could a GPU churn through some markov models to accelerate or improve the accuracy of speech recognition? It could also offload some of the transforms and filtering, e.g. for echo cancellation and removing or suppressing background noise.

We all remember the “double the killer delete select all” fiasco at a Microsoft product demo ;) GPUs to the rescue!