Security Blanket

Computer performance has come a long way in the past few years. Moore’s law has continued moving forward; right now, you can easily find a high-end CPU with 6 to 12 cores for between a few hundred and a thousand dollars.

But what if you want to throw a couple hundred cores at a problem? You could buy a rack or two of equipment, or you could just spend a few hundred dollars on a video card. In fact, graphics cards are so good at certain types of computation that both NVidia and AMD now make specialized cards (the NVidia Tesla series and the AMD FireStream series) that have a ton of cores, several gigabytes of memory, and extremely fast interconnects.