GPU Computing
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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