gpu support for modern systems

["C. Bergström"]

  On 06/25/11 05:45 PM, Alexander Best wrote:
> On Thu Jun 23 11, Christopher Bergström wrote:
>> 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)
> i'd really love to see this stuff being made available to the community. i
> think this could pose a huge advantage to all kinds of audiences: home users,
> servers people, etc.
>
> basically every modern computer comes with a gpu that performs much better at
> certain tasks than the installed CPU. not making use of the gpu is a huge waste
> of ressources. i think microsoft had a video on their channel 9 platform
> demonstrating the huge advantages that one can get when offloading certain
> tasks onto the gpu. just think of gimp being able to perform 10 times faster!
>
> ..or being able to compile world 10 times faster...or...or... ;)
You missed the part where I said it's *Tesla* only.  This is really only 
useful for HPC/life sciences/financial/server market.

This isn't to say we're not excited about it, but I'm still unsure who 
if anyone is using FreeBSD in those areas.