Are consumer grade GPUs (like the NVidia Geforce series) used for solving sparse linear equations systems in a professional setting? For example, by engineers performing finite element analysis?After all, at least for iterative methods, memory bandwidth is the bottleneck, and a Geforce 780 Ti provides a lot more of this than a Tesla C2075, while also costing a lot less.
Consumer GPUs for sparse matrices (e.g. FEA)
finite element;sparse;gpu
In a professional setting usually you run commercial software only on certified hardware, i.e. hardware on which the vendor has tested his software and is willing to provide user support. Certified and supported GPU's lists are usually very short...: there is really no technical reason, just commercial ones.In my experience, high end FEA solution vendors charge such horrible high sums for licenses that clients do not care for the cost of the GPU cards and just buy the supported ones.This said, if you are going to use consumer grade GPUs, you should test if, under sustained load, accuracy of the solution and performance is preserved.