Researcher Shows How GPUs Make Terrific Network Monitors 67
alphadogg writes "A network researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has found a potential new use for graphics processing units — capturing data about network traffic in real time. GPU-based network monitors could be uniquely qualified to keep pace with all the traffic flowing through networks running at 10Gbps or more, said Fermilab's Wenji Wu. Wenji presented his work as part of a poster series of new research at the SC 2013 supercomputing conference this week in Denver."
wishful thinking (Score:1, Insightful)
"Compared to a single core CPU-based network monitor, the GPU-based system was able to speed performance by as much as 17 times"
Shouldn't "researchers" know better how to execute benchmarks in such a way that a comparison between a CPU and a GPU actually makes sense and is not misleading? Why didn't they compare it to a 12 or 16 core CPU to show that it is only marginally better and requires programming in OpenCL or CUDA? Why didn't they take a 2P system and show that it is actually performing worse? In that case they could have drawn the correct conclusion that it actually makes no sense to use GPUs for this purpose! It is sad that even among Fermilab researchers wishful thinking bends results.