[R-sig-hpc] GPU Computing

Norm Matloff matloff at cs.ucdavis.edu
Wed Aug 22 00:33:25 CEST 2012


Yes, very true.  

Indeed, I currently have a nasty bug I'm trying to solve, involving R,
CUDA and the torque cluster manager.  No output!  Is the problem in R,
CUDA, torque or what?

There are other problems in addition to the platform issues, notably the
limited amount of memory in GPUs and the lack of effcient
synchronization hardware.

For now, GPU is not for the faint of heart (or the short of patience).

In my Rth library that I mentioned, I currently view it more as a tool
for multicore than GPU.  The latter is still very good on many problems,
though.

Norm

On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 03:10:42PM -0700, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

> 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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