To put it a little differently: the GPU architecture has been
developed around video games. In a video game architecture, you have a
fairly small amount of data (models and textures) going into the GPU
memory via the bus, and then a lot of data coming out of the GPU
hardware substrate to the video output.

The bus architecture is not designed to shovel a lot of data into the
GPU memory, and I don't know how good they are about pushing data out
to system memory. So you want problems where a "relatively" small
amount of data has to be chewed over heavily (without building up
numerical error). There are some like this- stock market quants for
example.

On Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 4:21 PM, Ted Dunning <[email protected]> wrote:
> In general, large scale machine learning is I/O bound already.  There are
> some things that would not be, but to really feed a GPU reasonably, data
> almost has to be memory resident.
>
> For more information on CUDA from Java, see (among others)
> http://www.jcuda.de/
>
> On Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 4:04 PM, Sean Owen <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> More than that, Mahout is mostly Hadoop-based, which is well up the
>> stack from Java. No there is nothing CUDA-related in the project. The
>> closest thing are the pure Java non-Hadoop-based recommender pieces.
>> But it is still far from CUDA.
>>
>> I think CUDA is intriguing since a lot of ML is a bunch of matrix math
>> and GPUs are very good at vectorized math. I think a first step is to
>> introduce proper JNI bindings for the big matrix math jobs and see how
>> much that gains. If it's a lot, then CUDA-izing the JNI pieces is an
>> interesting next step.
>>
>> On Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 11:41 PM, mohsen jadidi <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>> > Hello ,
>> >
>> > This is my first post here and I just started reading about Hadoop,
>> Mahout
>> > and all. I was wondering if there is any solution to use Mahout on
>> parallel
>> > computing on GPU (mainly CUDA) ? I know it's a bit wired question to ask
>> > because cud a is C base and Mahout is Java base , but I just ask it as
>> > curiosity! I think it would be a very cool combination to use both
>> cluster
>> > and local parallelisation !
>> >
>> > cheers,
>> > --
>> > Mohsen
>>



-- 
Lance Norskog
[email protected]

Reply via email to