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Re: question about CUDA

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg115677] Re: question about CUDA
• From: Patrick Scheibe <pscheibe at trm.uni-leipzig.de>
• Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2011 05:49:19 -0500 (EST)

Hi,

this is not possible for one obvious and several other reasons.
The obvious one is, that it is not implemented and *maybe* will never be
for several reasons.
You cannot think of CUDA as some kind of extension which allows you to
run Mathematica code on the faster graphics card. Every function has to
be separately implemented for CUDA.

The version 8 Mathematica has several function which use CUDA, mainly
for image processing and for matrix operations. Find an overview in the
doc-center here

CUDALink/guide/CUDALink

CUDA is best used for highly "data-parallel" algorithms [1] which is, as
far as I can say, not the case for Solve. 

Cheers
Patrick

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_parallelism


On Mon, 2011-01-17 at 18:56 +0300, Ivan Smirnov wrote:
> Patrick, thanks for answer. I have such thoughts.
> Can you say, what additional code is needed to run Solve command in
> Mathematica 8 with CUDA?
> 
> 2011/1/17 Patrick Scheibe <pscheibe at trm.uni-leipzig.de>
>         Hi,
>         
>         no, this is not true. You can use CUDA enabled cards for
>         computations
>         even if this is the only card in the system. It should be
>         clear, that
>         then some resources of your graphics card may be used by other
>         applications currently running. Another thing is that your
>         CUDA program
>         may use too much memory or has too many bugs and crashes your
>         system..
>         this is the point where a second card become handy. For now,
>         leave it
>         like that and start playing with CUDA. The specification of
>         your card
>         here
>         
>         http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_geforce_8800_gt_us.html
>         
>         shows that you have 112 CUDA Cores and 512 MB Ram, which is
>         fine to see
>         the magic.
>         
>         Cheers
>         Patrick
>         
>         
>         
>         On Mon, 2011-01-17 at 05:36 -0500, Ivan Smirnov wrote:
>         > Hello.
>         > I'm planning to start using CUDA.
>         > If I have 8800GT card (it supports CUDA), can I start use
>         CUDA computations
>         > in Mathematica 8 with just this card or I need install one
>         more card in that
>         > PC? (I heard that one man said that supposedly there are
>         needed 2 or more
>         > cards as CUDA are parallel computations - is it true?).
>         >
>         > Ivan Smirnov
>         >
>         >
>         
>         
> 
>