Now I'd like to know more about what general uses there are to these beasts. I see the point for simulating fluidsn etc., but out of climate researchers and aerospace engineers, who needs these sort of tools nowadays? sincerely wondering.
What can you do with machine learning? Basically everything: "Applications for machine learning include machine perception, computer vision, natural language processing, syntactic pattern recognition, search engines, medical diagnosis, bioinformatics, brain-machine interfaces and cheminformatics, detecting credit card fraud, stock market analysis, classifying DNA sequences, speech and handwriting recognition, object recognition in computer vision, game playing, software engineering, adaptive websites and robot locomotion." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning)
In our lab, we have developed a package called Theano (http://www.deeplearning.net/software/theano/), which allows you to take Python numpy code, adapt it slightly, and then automatically compile the mathematical functions in a optimized function graph which is transformed into C code and compiled to target the CPU or GPU. Which means to say, your matrix mathematics and machine learning algorithms just got a lot faster, with little cost in programmer time.
GPU is also good for anything that requires extensive parallel number crunching, like password cracking.
If you search for "GPU String Matching" you should find some good results.
So add toy programs to that list :)
I suppose this is my first open source project. hurray for me (:
These guys are using GPUs to convert series of images into 3D models in biology http://vidiowiki.com/watch/m5xbpad/
These guys use GPUs in sound synthesis: http://vidiowiki.com/watch/w9h9mfe/