But I can't help but wonder what the sys admin's response is going to be when I start asking for additional graphics cards being added to his perfectly built 2U database servers!
You are also asking the sysadmin to install a closed, unreliable kernel-level piece of software with that GPU.
it pains me to say that fglrx is still years behind them, however.
Unlike all of the closed network equipment they already manage.
http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-780...
I'm not suggesting CPU resources should be counted like that, but that's closer to have GPU resources are counted. Sure, it sounds impressive, but does that 2304 cores really represent fair truth to, say, 4 CPU cores?
NVidia GPUs have a theoretical peak of about 3-5 TFlops for 250 watts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_process...
Xeons have a theoretical peak of about 0.5-1 TFlops for 150 watts. http://www.microway.com/hpc-tech-tips/intel-xeon-e5-2600-v3-...
Is that completely apples-to-apples? Probably not since the Xeon is probably talking about double precision floating point versus single precision on the GPU. But for a lot of database applications which don't involve money, single precision floats have a sufficient level of accuracy for the performance improvement to be attractive.
Yeah the performance isn't 100x like it used to be but it's still enough that if you have racks and racks full of machines a 3-10x improvement could be really substantial. Going from $10k/mo in rent to $1k/mo in rent at a datacenter could make or break an early stage startup.
Further as things get cheaper they get used a lot more. Scientists have only two models: the ones they can run but don't really like and the ones they want to run. Adding fidelity to modeling codes isn't an absolute good but it's hard to argue that it makes the world worse.
"2300+ cores" is a VERY misleading way to represent GPU resources. You could also say GTX780 has 12 cores with 1/3rd clock frequency is an equally unfair and equally "true" way to express it, if you were trying to suggest CPUs are "better".