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

[Stefan Evert]

On 19 Nov 2008, at 07:56, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

>> 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.

Which makes me wonder whether R would be able to make use of this  
processing power, since the figures claimed by Wolfram are very  
probably for single-precision floats? (Am I right in thinking that R  
only works with double precision?)

According to the nVidia Web site, the Tesla architecture is _ten  
times_ slower for double-precision operations than for single- 
precision, which makes it seem far less amazing than at first sight.




Best regards,
Stefan Evert

[ stefan.evert at uos.de | http://purl.org/stefan.evert ]