[pro] GPU/CUDA & common lisp

[Alexander Repenning]

On Sep 29, 2011, at 7:54 AM, Tamas Papp wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> I am about to buy a new server for number crunching, and I would like to 
> keep my options open about GPU/CUDA based computations.  The most 
> intensively parallelizable thing that I am doing is particle filtering, 
> and currently that works fine (and is really fast) in a multi-core CPU 
> with SBCL, but I keep hearing wonderful things about GPUs from people, 
> and I was wondering if I could make use of them but still program in CL.
> 
> I basically have two questions:
> 
> - What is the current status of using CPUs for computation in CL (in 
> particular SBCL)?  All I found was CL-GPU but I haven't tried it yet (my 
> current server does not have a GPU).
> 

I assume you mean GPUs...

This is an XMLisp example using GLSL for image processing (blur and color saturation) via a shader getting about 100 GFlops (that is a lot):

http://www.google.com/codesearch#wtZMaMetHdI/trunk/XMLisp/sources/XLUI/examples/3D/GLSL%20OpenGL%20Blur%20shader.lisp&q=shader%20package:http://xmlisp%5C.googlecode%5C.com&ct=rc&cd=1&sq=

The integration with Common Lisp is: CLs load and compiles the shader (via GLSL functions) and communicates via glUniform functions in real time. Some of the image processing happens in CL via GL functions running on the CPU but the main part is the shader processing pixels/texels on the GPU.



> - What hardware is supported (if I want to use CL)?  Can I use something 
> like Nvidia's TESCLA C line?

CUDA has its own set of requirements but GLSL runs on most video cards unless they are super old. E.g., on Mac hardware:

http://developer.apple.com/graphicsimaging/opengl/capabilities/


not sure this is useful,  Alex


> 
> Any help/pointers/accounts would be appreciated, I am just exploring this 
> so I don't know much about it yet, apologies if I am not asking the right 
> questions.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Tamas
> 
> 
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Prof. Alexander Repenning

University of Colorado
Computer Science Department
Boulder, CO 80309-430

vCard: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/AlexanderRepenning.vcf


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