Yeah, think of something like earnings reports. It's very important that no one gets early access, and very useful to have a third party handle it so you can prove that no one has early access. And if the third party screws it up, they get investigated by the SEC, not you.
I saw the previous developer of the CCBN (Corporate Communications Broadcast Network) pop up on in the HN comments last time this was mentioned to explain its stagnation and mishandling after being bought by Thomson-Reuters. Can't find it now myself; anyone else have the link?
I've never used Amazon EC2, but with this kind of application, I might have to give it a try. Buying a $300 graphics card just to try some GPU programming is ridiculous.
AMD's APUs are quite cheap (~$100) CPU+GPU designs similar to those in the upcoming PS4 and XBox One (though the retail APUs are somewhat less powerful). They've been more-or-less designed specifically around the needs of a heterogenous OpenCL application.
Finally, the last several generations of NVidia cards all support both CUDA and OpenCL; the newer cards do support additional features though. You should be able to pick up a low-end, recent-edition Nvidia GPU for roughly $100.
The new g2.2xlarge instances are $0.650/hour, and the existing cg1.4xlarge are $2.100/hour; so it may make sense to experiment on AWS a bit, then buy your own card for long-term use if you decide to spend more time doing GPU programming.
Sadly, Intel's integrated-GPU OpenCL still doesn't support Linux, and only just started supporting OS X in 10.9 Mavericks[1]. Usually Intel's Linux GPU support is great; I don't know why this is different.
(Intel do have a Linux OpenCL implementation for Xeon CPU cores and Xeon Phi coprocessor[2], which doesn't help me much. On-CPU OpenCL is fine but hardly faster than regular CPU code, and Phi coprocessors aren't very common currently.)
With stuff like this it looks like the devices we use could be only streaming clients in the future and wont require a lot of processing power but excellent network connectivity.
That goes a bit against the trend in web development to move much of the processing to the client side so i wonder where this will go.
Really high performance streaming of apps/games could revert the trend of making everything browser based in favor of streamed native apps.
I work on some opengl software that renders slideshows, and this is precisely what we need. We've used the bigger CG1.4xlarge nodes in the past but they are very expensive for what we're doing. The lower price on this (65¢/hr instead of $2.40) is going to be much more manageable for us.
this is huge beyond graphics, new levels of performance can be achieved with GPGPU for data intensive startups. i would love to see someone build a company around this.
The bitcoin network difficulty is rising so fast that even the first-gen ASICs are becoming obsolete.
For example if you have a good Radeon HD7970, you can get about .8 GH/s. Based on the rate of difficulty increase the 7970 would mine about 0.02 BTC in all of November 2013 and 0.01 BTC in December 2013 and < 0.01/month after that.
For various reasons Nvidia cards are slower at BTC mining than AMD. The fastest Nvidia card, the Tesla S2070, can only hash about 0.750 GH/s.
Even 60GH/s ASIC miners will be earning < 0.10 BTC per month by March 2014. In August 2013 a 60GH/s miner would make ~0.8 BTC PER DAY. That's how quickly the difficulty is increasing.
At this point no GPU would make a decent bitcoin miner, except as a hobby.