[R-sig-hpc] GPU Computing

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 1:54 PM, Norm Matloff <matloff at cs.ucdavis.edu> wrote:
> 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

There are a number of GPU packages in that task view, but few of them
compile and execute in a pure open source environment (*none* on any
of my recent tests with openSUSE and Fedora; I haven't attempted
Debian or Ubuntu). And as far as I can recall they are NVidia only;
there is precious little pure open source code that actually works out
of the box for Intel or AMD/ATI GPUs. There are GCC gotchas, missing
libraries and all sorts of other non-repeatabilities to waste effort
on. I gave up on pure open source GPU usage with R.

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