Internet and Technology

A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a RISC processor used in video game systems and computers for calculating the graphical output for monitors. GPUs are used at manipulating and displaying computer graphics. GPUs are a part of mother board or they can come along with video cards. Graphic accelerators are a part of GPU also. High performance GPU computing involves solving advanced computational problems using supercomputers and computer clusters. GPU computing includes all tasks that a graphics processing unit can calculate.

In GPU computing the CPU calculations are replaced by Graphics Processing Units. Migrating large scale algorithms and entire kernel onto the GPU co-processors help in arriving at the answer much faster and thus decreases the processing time. GPUs are never a complete replacement for CPUs but complementary. Parallel operation of CPU and GPU has found to increase the performance. CPU’s offload the tasks which are better performed by GPU leading to high performance computing. GPU excel CPU’s in certain computational tasks.

A GPU’s processing power is mostly used while dealing with 3D scenes and video. The GPU computing for a graphics task such as rendering a 3D scene involves many stages like vertex processing, vertices grouping, fragment processing and mathematical operations. GPU computing is also known as General Purpose Computation on Graphics Processing Unit. Acceleration of video and picture editing, artificial intelligence and physics calculations come under the tasks of GPU computing.

GPU uses Advanced Graphics Port (AGP) to communicate with the mother board of a computer. Programmable shaders capable of manipulating vertices and textures are supported by latest GPUs. Very high precision color spaces, over sampling and interpolation techniques to reduce aliasing are also supported by GPU. GPU can process multiple independent vertices and fragments in parallel. Moreover a variety of computational resources are available on the GPU.

Multi-GPU’s are also available and are generally used in high-end home computers to accelerate computer games. Multi-GPU systems use more than one GPU. An example of multi-GPU system is Nvidia which can make a PC perform 250 times faster than usual. Not only that but by making use of the CUDA architecture which is made up ofhundreds of processors cores data set can be easily crunched via the application. General Purpose computing on graphics processing unit uses a GPU to perform computation in applications traditionally handled by CPUs. Additional programmable stages are included to make this happen. The general Purpose Computing on GPU(GPGPU)has cleared new ways in diverse fields like scientific image processing, oil exploration, linear algebra and 3D reconstruction.

GP GPUs are used in computer clusters, physics engines, FFT, audio signal processing, digital image processing, bioinformatics, scientific computing, DSP, neural networks and many more. GPU computing CUDA was developed by Nvidia. AMD has announced a super computer based on GPU which will be built of more than thousand GPUs. This supercomputer will have a computing power of one petaflop. The processing power of GPUs have further increased due to the advent of OpenGL API and similar functionalities in DirectX. Intel, AMD/ATI, NVIDIA and S3 Graphics are some of the players in the market who produce GPUs. Many companies are now engaged in researches to find out the further benefits of GPU computing.

So is your computer extremely slow? Are you wasting more time waiting then you are actually working? This can be completely frustrating and at one time or another all computer users will experience their computer being extremely slow. Fortunately there are some things that you can do to fix a slow computer.

When you first purchase your computer it runs fantastic, you can open and close programs quickly, you can browse the Internet with speed, going from website to website, opening and closing pages without a problem, but after awhile you begin to notice a change. Your computer isn’t running with the same type of performance it had when you first purchased it and you spend more time waiting because your computer is extremely slow. Well if your now slow computer has you wanting to throw it out the window lets see what we can do to remedy the problem.

One of the many causes of a computer running extremely slow is that you have very low available disk space on your hard drive. Your hard drive needs to have an adequate amount of free space to allow for temporary files and it must also be able to accommodate your swap file. If your swap file cannot accept temporary files it will result in a slow computer. A swap file is just a file that is stored on your hard drive and it is used to store information that is not being used by your computers RAM (random access memory) at any particular moment. If your computer is extremely slow, your hard drive could be lacking the room for your swap file to grow, keeping it from storing more temporary files which in turns frees up more of your memory.

We can help your slow computer by regaining some of the space on your hard drive, in a couple of ways. The first step you should take is to run the disk clean up option that is right inside your system tools. To get to your system tools you would click on your “Start” button, then open “All Programs,” then click on “Accessories” and choose “System Tools” from the list and that opens up another list that you will choose “Disk Clean Up” from. Once you have Disk Clean Up opened you just double click on it and it will do all the rest. Now try using your slow computer for a day or two and see if it has made any improvements on your computers performance.

Now is your computer extremely slow even after you completed the Disk Clean Up and put it to use for a day or two? If so then we will have to use another trick to try and correct the problem. Your computer will contain folders that have files in them that are used for uninstalling Microsoft Windows updates. When ever you update your computer with Microsoft updates you simultaneously download the uninstall files which will allow you to uninstall any updates that you decide you don’t want for one reason or another. Well if your computer is extremely slow you may want to consider deleting these uninstall folders because they can take up a significant amount of hard drive space resulting in a slow computer.

You are going to want to locate and delete these uninstall files and to do that you must first open “My Computer” and inside My Computer your going to open your “C: Drive.” Now inside your C-drive you will open “Windows” or it may be called the “Winnt Folder” and when this folder is open you will see folders labeled $NTUninstall, now any of these folders that are older then a month you can delete. That should have cleaned up a lot of unnecessary files and folders, freeing up quite a bit of hard drive space. This will usually correct any problems causing your computer to be extremely slow.

Now, if you find yourself constantly complaining because your computer is extremely slow you now have a couple of tricks up your sleeve that you can use anytime that should help correct the problem.