From monty at sprintmail.com  Tue Feb 20 03:19:32 2007
From: monty at sprintmail.com (Rod Montgomery)
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2007 21:19:32 -0500
Subject: [Rd]  Using GPUs for computation
Message-ID: <45DA5AB4.8030908@sprintmail.com>

> Douglas Bates <dmbates_at_gmail.com> wrote on Tue 24 Jan 2006 - 14:38:46 GMT:
> 
[snip]
> More seriously, the approach to speeding up model fitting that has been most successful to date is to speed up the BLAS
> (Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines), especially the Level-3 BLAS. The bulk of the computation in the Matrix package takes
> place in either Lapack (for dense matrices) or CHOLMOD (for sparse matrices) code and those are based on calls to the
> Levels 1, 2 and 3 BLAS. The Atlas package and K. Goto's BLAS are designed to obtain the highest level of performance
> possible from the CPU on these routines. I think the easiest way of incorporating the power of the GPU into the model
> fitting process would be to port the BLAS to the GPU. I also imagine that someone somewhere has already started on that.
> 
I haven't seen anything more recent about using GPUs to compute for R, but NVIDIA just recently made available a beta of its
CUDA environment for general-purpose computation on its new 8800-series GPUs, and there seems to be a BLAS library there.

I tried to include links in this message, but I got "Message rejected by filter rule match" from r-devel-owner when I did so.



[Rd] Using GPUs for computation
Rod Montgomery