R devel - Aug 2012 - GPU Computing

Hi all,

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 
computing but they are mainly providing functionality for big dataset or 
big matrices. I use mainly mclapply to speed up simulations by running 
several simulations in parallel, which works nicely.

Is it possible to do the same with a multicore GPU? I am planning to buy 
a tesla 2075, and I want to know before if it is something we can do 
with R. May be by modifying mclapply().

Thanks for your suggestions.


-- 
*Pierre Chaussé*
Assistant Professor
Department of Economics
University of Waterloo

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

Oops, sent to the wrong list (again), sorry.

Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2012 13:54:48 -0700
From: Norm Matloff <matloff at cs.ucdavis.edu>
To: r-sig-hpc at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [R-sig-hpc] GPU Computing

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

You might also take a look at my Rth package, at

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/rth.html 

Norm Matloff