More Graphic Card Computations

There's a site, GPGPU (General Purpose computation on Graphics Processing Units), dedicated to interesting things one can do with a graphics card. (Well, there's always graphics, but using things for their intended purpose can get boring :)

Last fall, I wondered about the possiblity of doing Monte Carlo on the graphics card.

On the GPGPU site there's a link to a paper about doing Ising model and percolation simulations on the graphics card (Benchmarking and Implementation of Probability-Based Simulations on Programmable Graphics Cards). The work is primarily for proof of concept and benchmarking, with an eye towards lattice QCD simulations eventually. Hmm. Play a killer game of Quake *and* uncover fundamental secrets of the universe - what a combination!

I can imagine students requesting the latest "Ising co-processors" so they can "make progress on their thesis" when Doom 3 comes out. (Err, maybe they need to leave off that last part when making the request).