> Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2006 13:28:48 -0400 > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Peter Jay Salzman) > Subject: Re: [vox-tech] GPU calculations > On Tue 13 Jun 06, 10:20 AM, Richard Harke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
> > Why don't you look at www.gpgpu.org > > GPGPU -> General Purpose computing on a GPU > Thanks, Richard. Good find! I think you do numerical computing as well -- > have you done any of this? I've seen GPU implementations for solving sparse Pete, as I mentioned to you recently, I've been looking into GPGPU too, and though I am at the VERY beginning stages of this, I thought might add a little bit to the discussion here. First, there are two main APIs that have been developed, brook and Sh (as well as an "assembly language"), used from C/C++ code. At this time it appears that brook is the more popular of the two. Both are stream processing languages, basically vector operations. Anyone who is familiar with MPI or Python or ... will feel comfortable here. There is a reliable rumor that an interface from OpenMP is being developed, which would be really nice. All of these seem to work via preprocessors, a mechanism I've always found to be undesirable, but hey, one can't have everything. I've found that brook is quite easy to learn--though less easy to build on Linux :-) an apparent consequence of the Microsoft orientation of much of the current GPGPU community. (They do apparently use GCC/Cygwin, though.) I've not yet succeeded in building it under Fedora 5, though I haven't put much time into it yet. All I can tell you so far is that it didn't build right out of the box. If you or anyone else succeeds in building it under any form of Linux, I'd appreciate hearing how it went. One of the main movers and shakers in the GPGPU community is John Owens, an ECE professor at UCD, [EMAIL PROTECTED] He tells me that the brook discussion group at http://www.gpgpu.org/forums/ is very helpful for build or other problems. Another problem is that one apparently needs at least some knowledge of graphics programming in order to really take advantage of all this. That of course is not surprising, and it does appear that one can get pretty far without knowing any graphics, but to really take full advantage of the graphics hardware one needs to know what the hardware does, which in turn means knowing a bit of graphics. There are a number of good tutorials on brook on the Web. Norm _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
