Hundreds of GigaFLOPs are available in your PC today….in fact, you might even have a TeraFLOP in there. As someone who cut his teeth on a Cray C90 (15 GFLOPS max), this is an intriguing opportunity to dabble; for the latter-day high performance computing programming (whether you’re trying to predict protein structure, price options, or trying to figure out how to thread your game), it is almost too tempting to ignore. However, like a shimmering, unreachable oasis, today’s GPUs offer the promise of all the performance you require, but achieving that goal for all but a few applications (notably, those they were designed for: rasterization)is elusive.