[Beowulf] Re: GPU Beowulf Clusters

[Jon Forrest]

On 2/1/2010 7:24 AM, richard.walsh at comcast.net wrote:

> Coming in on this late, but to reduce this work load there is PGI's version
> 10.0 compiler suite which supports accelerator compiler directives. This
> will reduce the coding effort, but probably suffer from the classical
> "if it is
> easy, it won't perform as well" trade-off. My experience is limited, but
> a nice intro can be found at:

I'm not sure how much traction such a thing will get.
Let's say you have a big Fortran program that you want
to port to CUDA. Let's assume you already know where the
program spends its time, so you know which routines
are good candidates for running on the GPU.

Rather than rewriting the whole program in C[++],
wouldn't it be easiest to leave all the non-CUDA
parts of the program in Fortran, and then to call
CUDA routines written in C[++]. Since the CUDA
routines will have to be rewritten anyway, why
write them in a language which would require
purchasing yet another compiler?

Cordially,
-- 
Jon Forrest
Research Computing Support
College of Chemistry
173 Tan Hall
University of California Berkeley
Berkeley, CA
94720-1460
510-643-1032
jlforrest at berkeley.edu