So CUDA is for numerical computation, and doesn't involve any display, per se. Of course you can visualize your results with the graphics card in many cases with OpenGL directly, but that's not the point.
There have long been rumors about a CUDA driver for Solaris / OpenSolaris, but it's never been official. One technical detail: NVIDIA's compilers take either CUDA C -or- OpenCL, and compile the source code to a form of assembler called PTX, and that's fed to the graphics card. So by CUDA, I mean CUDA and OpenCL, since one driver will automatically support both, the way they have it architected and designed. They are not stupid; they want people to use their cards, so they support OpenCL more than anyone. And, frankly, vendor independence isn't all it's cracked up to be in this situation. ATI/AMD have not invested much effort in getting their act together on OpenCL in the real world. Probably 95+% that I know of, doing real scientific or engineering work, are doing it with CUDA, because it's much more established, and the real investment isn't in the boards, but in the months and years it takes to learn the programming paradigm. But remember that, with any NVIDIA CUDA driver, it will always support the latest OpenCL, too (and any open distribution should loudly insist on that capability). It's not that I think people here should spend the resources doing that, but more to get in contact with NVIDIA and make sure their drivers are available. I can tell you that it would be PERFECT for us to have a Nexenta-like non-desktop distribution based on IllumOS, where we could run a very efficient small OS and use it to deploy a lot of GPUs. Much as you want the OS and its details to be invisible for NAS storage, just presenting a mapped drive via NFS to the user, if you could do the same with a GPU for computing, that owuld be ideal. I just need a command line, access to a lot of storage and RAM, and that's it. SSHing in and out is perfectly fine; don't even need (or want) much of a GUI. Right now, there is NO platform that would give my data the security and management features of ZFS, and the access to GPU computing. If IllumOS could do this in a reliable, straightforward manner, I could see it being deployed in a lot of places very quickly. Thanks! -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
