It is a very long but informative article. I just include some parts in this message.
http://itexpertvoice.com/home/why-gaming-chips-are-moving-into-the-server-room/After several years of trying, graphics processing units (GPUs) are beginning to win over the major server vendors. Dell and IBM are the first tier-one server vendors to adopt GPUs as server processors for high-performance computing (HPC).
In May, IBM announced plans to offer a pair of Tesla M2050 GPUs in its iDataPlex dx360 M3 scale-out servers. Dell followed with an early June announcement that its PowerEdge M610x blade servers would come with a pair of Tesla GPUs. The M610x, equipped with an Intel Xeon 5500 or 5600, can generate up to 400 gigaflops of performance.
Stream processing is a computation technique used in parallel processing designed to use many computational units, whereby the software manages things like memory allocation, data synchronization, and communication. All of those cores are connected by high-speed interconnects.
GPU threads are much smaller than CPU threads because they are just a bunch of math instructions. Often, the math instruction might be as simple as addition, done over and over. That makes GPU cores great for switching threads, because the cores can change from one thread to another in one clock cycle, something CPUs can't do. A CPU thread is a complex series of instructions, such as a system process or operating system call.
Lately, people with jobs requiring high performance computing are realizing that those 483 to 1,600 math cores might do something besides render videogames.
The final missing ingredient was double-precision floating-point math, a necessity in complex scientific calculations. Both Nvidia and ATI added double-precision floating-point capability to their chips. A single-precision floating-point digit is 32-bits long, or 2^32, while double precision is 64-bits long, or 2^64. This is irrelevant to gamers but a must-have for a scientific researcher or software developer who is, say, simulating global climate patterns.
