Dear R-devel,
We are planning a package that provides R interface to cuBLAS (CUDA accelerated
BLAS). Due to CUDA's requirement, we are wondering if anyone can provide
some guidance and suggestions on best way forward.
CUDA lists Visual Studio as a requirement on Windows, and it looks like no one
had succeed in building a DLL that can be called from R using the mingw tools in
Rtools. Google search results suggest that no one had been able to get around
using MSVS to build a usable DLL so far. What worked was to build .cu code into
DLL using MSVS, then placing the DLL into the src/ subdirectory, and then using
R CMD INSTALL to finish building the binary package with the help of
configure.win and src/Makevars.win files.
As far as I can tell, no gpu/cuda based R package has Windows version, on or off
CRAN. Several simply states Windows as being not supported. We would like to
make our package as widely applicable as possible, so we're seeking
advise/suggestion on how to resolve this issue.
One way is to have an R-only package, and upon load the package, detect whether
the shared library needed is present. If not, inform the user to run a function
that detect the OS and presence of CUDA, and download the appropriate shared
library file. The problem is as long as there are C code in src/, it will not
pass CRAN check. Also, that seems to violate some CRAN policies.
The other is simply to follow what packages like gputools/rpud/etc. and have
only source package on CRAN, and provide Windows binaries off CRAN (perhaps with
a note in the README on where to download them).
We'd very much appreciate any pointer.
Best,
Andy
Andy Liaw
Biometrics Research, Merck Research Laboratories
PO Box 2000 RY34-300 Rahway, NJ 07065
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