[pymvpa] PyMVPA on PS3 vs. OpenCL & GPU?

[Matthias Ekman]

Hi,

In the past year I was working a lot with multisubject searchlight 
permutation analysis which took several month. Now I am thinking about 
buying a Playstation 3 and install Yellow Dog or Debian Linux. So this 
is just for PyMVPA as I am not interested in gaming :)

The basic idea is, that a PS3 comes with this strong CPU and is 
considerably cheap (260 EUR) at the moment (but also limited RAM of 
256MB). The OpenCV project got some nice results with the Cell CPU (I 
assume after a lot of tweaking): 
http://www.fixstars.com/en/company/press/20071128.html

Does anyone have any experience with getting PyMVPA running on a PS3 or 
Power PC architecture  in general?

Here http://qa.debian.org/debcheck.php?dist=testing&package=pymvpa it says:

"Package has a Recommends on python-psyco which cannot be satisfied on 
powerpc"

so it might be somehow difficult to get  PyMVPA running?

An alternative would be to buy a Direct X11/OpenCL compatible GPU and 
work with Python::OpenCL 
(http://python-opencl.next-touch.com/index.html). I think that Per is 
working with CUDA. Are those results promising? Would it be an option to 
support OpenCL in a upcoming major release of PyMVPA (would be my 
favourite feature-request :-))?

Would be glad to hear what you think about the idea :)

Bests,
Matthias