[R-sig-hpc] GPU Computing

[Norm Matloff]

In-Reply-To

Peter Chausse wrote:

> I am looking for a function similar to mclapply() that would work with
> GPU cores. I have looked at all possible packages related to GPU...

The short answer is no.

Functions like mclapply() work on, say a quad core machine, by setting
up new invocations of R to run on each of the four CPU cores.  What you
have in mind would mean having R run on each of the GPU cores.  This is
not possible, for a variety of reasons (R needs a terminal shell, it
needs I/O etc.).

To have R take advantage of GPUs, one must write C/C++ (or FORTRAN)
code.  Currently packages that do this are very limited.  See the
relevant CRAN Task View, at

http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/HighPerformanceComputing.html

You might also take a look at my Rth package, at

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/rth.html 

Norm Matloff