gpu support for modern systems

[Christopher Bergström]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 6:43 AM, Alexander Best <arundel at freebsd.org> wrote:
> hi there,
>
> modern systems with their suffisticated gpus provide quite a potential for
> moving some of the workload from cpu to gpu. for certain stuff gpus are much
> faster than cpus, like number crunching or encoding/decoding multimedia
> contents.
>
> anybody who is using mplayer(1) in combination with nvidia cards and vdpau has
> probably experienced how much faster and less cpu intensive things can work out
> when decoding HD video stuff e.g.
>
> since opencl/cuda isn't available under freebsd, it doesn't seem possible to
> somehow hook the nvidia gpu into the every day freebsd workload that easily.

PathScale has HMPP and partial CUDA support on FreeBSD now.  Some
caveats to this

1) Non-free (We could possibly make the tools free for FreeBSD
community, but I'd have to get approval for it)
2) CUDA support isn't complete (Basic core is there and HMPP C/Fortran works)
3) Tesla 20xx series only

We offer real support for FreeBSD and it's not using any linux emulator hacks.

Let me know if anyone is interested.  (If we get enough positive
feedback I'll pursue some resolution to #1)

./C