Excellent overview of graphics cards:

Graphics card buyers guide

Check out:

GLSLang Tutorial

It contains really nice description of the pipeline.

Snort on the GPU

This is a very interesting idea. Try to implement Snort functions as vertex/fragment shaders. I'm going to see if I can get a demo up an running.
Some options are:

• Using GLSL + ATI Radeon 9000 on Mac OS X


• Using Cg + NVidia FX 5200 on Linux

GLSL + Radeon 9000 + Mac OS X:

Try this first. Snort 2.3.0.
First trace through the Snort source to determine where a shader could exist.

Question: Does my Radeon 9000 support GLSL on Mac OS X???
Answer:


Cg + NVidia FX 5200 + Linux: