[NBLUG/talk] Uses for GPGPU?

Lincoln Peters anfrind at gmail.com
Wed Jan 14 22:21:30 PST 2009


On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 10:00 PM, Tim Preston <timp at sonic.net> wrote:
> OK. Am I missing something? We are talking about increased processing power
> and utilizing the processors on all devices within a system in parallel to
> accelerate programs that need to crunch lots of code and the only thing
> we're talking about is hacking?
>
> How about improved identification of facial features in streaming video? Or,
> maybe tracking moving objects in real time with an improved rate of
> accuracy?

I know a guy who was working on using a GPU program to analyze a
recording of someone's voice and determine whose voice it is.  I think
the algorithm he's using is open-source (it was developed by
researchers at MIT), but his specific implementation is proprietary.

I was actually thinking it might be useful for cyber-security, e.g. if
you used a GPGPU-based application to perform real-time packet
inspection, you might be able to identify threats that would otherwise
be way too hard.  One example that comes to mind (although I'm not
sure how practical it would be) would be to analyze incoming data
files during transfer (i.e. in real-time) e.g. for the presence of
valid Intel CPU code (something that I don't think your average data
file should contain).  If that worked, it could protect against buffer
overflow attacks, even if the vulnerability was not known to anyone
but the attacker.


-- 
Lincoln Peters
<anfrind at gmail.com>



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