R help - Nov 2008 - Mathematica now working with Nvidia GPUs --> any plan for R?

Dear All,

I just read an announcement saying that Mathematica is launching a
version working with Nvidia GPUs. It is claimed that it'd make it
~10-100x faster!
http://www.physorg.com/news146247669.html

I was wondering if you are aware of any development going into this
direction with R?

Thanks for sharing your thoughts,

Best wishes,

Emmanuel

On Tue, 18 Nov 2008, Emmanuel Levy wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> I just read an announcement saying that Mathematica is launching a
> version working with Nvidia GPUs. It is claimed that it'd make it
> ~10-100x faster!
> http://www.physorg.com/news146247669.html
Well, lots of things are 'claimed' in marketing (and Wolfram is not shy
to
claim).  I think that you need lots of GPUs, as well as the right problem.
> I was wondering if you are aware of any development going into this
> direction with R?
It seems so, as users have asked about using CUDA in R packages.

Parallelization is not at all easy, but there is work on making R better 
able to use multi-core CPUs, which are expected to become far more common 
that tens of GPUs.
> Thanks for sharing your thoughts,
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Emmanuel
PS: R-devel is the list on which to discuss the development of R.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
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