[R-sig-hpc] GPU Computing

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 3:33 PM, Norm Matloff <matloff at cs.ucdavis.edu> wrote:
> 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).

Or for the unbudgeted open source advocate - it's a capital-intensive
minefield of patents and is likely to remain so for a long time.

>
> 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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