[R-sig-hpc] GPU Computing

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 6:54 AM, Simon Urbanek
<simon.urbanek at r-project.org> wrote:

> That is not true - OpenCL is platform independent and you can use a wide range of back-end implementations - not only GPUs but also accelerators and CPUs. See the installation notes in the package for details - there are many to choose from. You may still need to tweak kernels for performance on particular type of back-end (e.g., kernels optimized for CPUs won't be very fast on GPUs and vice-versa), but at least you need not worry about vendors. The nice thing about OpenCL is that the API is open source and free so you can use it without any baggage, however, drivers for particular hardware tend to be proprietary just because GPU vendors like their secret performance sauce to stay secret.

I wasn't able to get OpenCL to run on anything except Intel CPUs. My
ancient NVidia GeForce 6150SE nForce 430 didn't work, even with
proprietary Linux drivers and other binary stuff downloaded from the
NVidia site. The open source "nouveau" drivers? Fugeddaboutit! The
built-in GPU on my year-old Intel i5 laptop? Nope. I don't have an ATI
/ AMD GPU any more, so maybe that one actually works.

This stuff is hand-tuned to work on Windows gamer gear, Macs and
strategic government HPC procurements. Everybody else is a
second-class citizen.

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