FreeBSD, GPGPU and OpenCL/CUDA

[emorras at xroff.net]

Hi Christopher,

"C. Bergström" <cbergstrom at pathscale.com> escribió:

> PathScale and CAPS recently announced HMPP as a new manycore GPGPU  
> open standard and there's a chance you'll see it ported to FBSD.  In  
> addition to this you could see other open standards working well on  
> FBSD, but that depends on market demand and feedback.

Do we need with this suite a nvidia/ati driver that executes the  
CUDA/OpenCL/Stream code? If yes, we'll have the same problem.

>> I havn't looked deeper into AMDs offerings, but I guess since it's  
>> silent around OpenCL and AMD-based GPGPU, even with Linux there  
>> isn't much.
>> I'm not very close to the GPGPU scene, we even start thinking about  
>> porting and developing some mathematical stuff into libraries and  
>> thought about OpenCL.
>> Unluckily, in my team I'm the only one utilizing FreeBSD.
>>
>> Maybe someone out here has solved some problems and could email me.  
>> Even AMD seems to be a white spot in the subject of GPGPU and  
>> FreeBSD for me, maybe someone could shed some light on this.
> What's blocking this from being available now
> 	a) someone porting the kernel driver over or
> 	b) us getting funding to do it.

Perhaps the FreeBSD Foundation can open a new project for it. Today it  
can be seen like a "lost-time-addon" for FreeBSD, but not only  
Maths/Physics/Chemistry can use GPGPU, it can be used by databases,  
compilers, servers, and more in a nearer future. For example, all  
algorithms to filter image and video (Scanner, PET, Astronomy, video  
de/compression, etc) are being ported to gpgpu and i can't use FreeBSD  
for this.

> When we started working on the driver months ago one of the main  
> goals was to allow greater portability.  Details for any interested  
> developers is available any time.  In general I'd like to see more  
> open source OS diversity in the HPC industry and happy to help where  
> I can.

FreeBSD has better OpenMP capabilities by its network connections,  
i'll like to use it in the next HPC era.

> For those curious why NVIDIA doesn't port CUDA to FBSD...  My guess  
> is that to do a high quality job it would take 1-2 man years of  
> effort.  In the non-FOSS world that's expensive.
>
> Best,
>
> ./Christopher

L