[R] Mathematica now working with Nvidia GPUs --> any plan for R?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 18 Nov 2008, Emmanuel Levy wrote:

> Dear All,
>
> I just read an announcement saying that Mathematica is launching a
> version working with Nvidia GPUs. It is claimed that it'd make it
> ~10-100x faster!
> http://www.physorg.com/news146247669.html

Well, lots of things are 'claimed' in marketing (and Wolfram is not shy to 
claim).  I think that you need lots of GPUs, as well as the right problem.

> I was wondering if you are aware of any development going into this
> direction with R?

It seems so, as users have asked about using CUDA in R packages.

Parallelization is not at all easy, but there is work on making R better 
able to use multi-core CPUs, which are expected to become far more common 
that tens of GPUs.

> Thanks for sharing your thoughts,
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Emmanuel

PS: R-devel is the list on which to discuss the development of R.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
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