WWOT: GPU eg CUDA for Gene-Cracking

fausseplanete wrote on 9/29/2009, 3:39 AM
In terms of hardware, the (parallel) computing power of graphic processing units (GPUs) might provide significant performance benefits to R users. Following on the earlier releases of vendor-specific APIs (e.g., nVidia (2007) proposed CUDA), standards for programming GPUs in a vendor-independent fashion are beginning to emerge (Khronos Group 2008).

They offer a programming model that is designed to allow direct access to the specific graphics
hardware, with the graphics hardware running a very high number of threads in parallel. A bioinformatics application for sequence alignment with GPUs (C code, no R integration) has been published by Manavski and Valle (2008) and illustrates the usability of GPUs for acceleration and management of large amounts of biological data.

Comments

hazydave wrote on 10/10/2009, 1:25 AM
The TMPGenc encoder is currently using CUDA or Stream (ATi's answer to the same question) to accelerate MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 encoding... so maybe not so off-topic (they also use the SPARS engine -- PS3-on-a-PCI-card, sort-of-, if you have one). I mean, while it's nice that Vegas will sometimes use all four CPUs in my Q9550 chip, it would be nice if it could tap the other 118 processors in the machine for sometime useful.

Though more than rendering final, I'd like to seem acceleration and multithreading applied to editing. Right now, my machine can play back 1080/60p video just dandy in realtime, using a combination of multithreaded and GPU-accelerated AVC decoding. But in Vegas, it crawls.

Maybe Sony is just waiting for DirectCompute or OpenCL. We'll see...
Coursedesign wrote on 10/10/2009, 6:20 AM
OpenCL is the multi-vendor standard for this, that many vendors have been waiting for, and it has been actively implemented with very good results already.

Nvidia of course would like you to buy a proprietary standard that they control.
rmack350 wrote on 10/11/2009, 1:37 PM
For Vegas I'd place my bets on DirectCompute over OpenCL just because SCS has always made use of Microsoft tools. I think OpenCL would probably be a better choice if they have any desire to go multi-platform but they've never shown any signs of doing this in the past.

The main thing seems to me that there be a mature means of using the GPU that's supported directly by the OS.

As HazyDave is finding, not all parts of Vegas make good use of multiple cores. I'm sure you'd find the exact same thing going on if Vegas also used the GPU.

Rob Mack
Coursedesign wrote on 10/11/2009, 2:47 PM
For Vegas I'd place my bets on DirectCompute over OpenCL just because SCS has always made use of Microsoft tools.

That's for sure.... We're living with ye olde '90s VfW [Video for Windows] for this reason.

But, Microsoft has seen as it being in its business interest to support open standards (IE8...), and this could lead to a 100% pullback from DirectCompute, leaving everyone who supported this in the dust (as happened a few times before).

It's just impossible to know, but it has become painfully clear that Microsoft today lacks the guidance of Bill Gates, someone who can see the big picture, have a vision for the company, and inspire employees.

Ballmer is not that person.

He also seems to have intentionally or unintentionally squeezed the life out of Microsoft's creative efforts, which increases the risk for those (such as SCS/Sony) who have decided to bet their entire farms on Microsoft being a benevolent dictator who provides for all their needs.