For years Nvidia has been touting its Tesla GPGPU platform as
the next big thing in computing. It can be used to build supercomputers
for massive parallel computing tasks, dull scientific stuff and we hear
it's a rather good basis for toasters, too.
However, Kaspersky
decided to be a bit more sensible and utilize Tesla's number crunching
prowess to improve security. We already mentioned CUDA could be used to run security software, here. The Russian security incorporated Tesla
S1070 units into its security infrastructure to boost client
protection. Kaspersky claims the Tesla managed to outperform a 2.6GHz
Core 2 Duo in certain tasks by a factor of 360. No, it's not 360
percent faster, it's 360 times faster.
Kaspersky redeveloped its similarity algorithms and optimized them to
simultaneously perform hundreds of thousands of instructions. Kaspersky
boffins utilized the Nvidia CUDA SDK development environment
specifically for this purpose as it allows programs to be written for
the latest generations of NVIDIA graphics processors in standard
programming languages.
Mind you, this doesn't mean regular users
with Nvidia GPUs support stand to benefit from the technology anytime
soon, but could be a sign of things to come. Both Nvidia and ATI are pushing parallel computing and offering some rudimentary GPGPU capabilities, mainly in the video encoding department. Using GPUs to power AV software is something much more useful than video transcoding and could bring GPGPU to a much wider audience.
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Kaspersky enlists CUDA to kill viruses
Delivers the AV promise