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

[Michael Hanke]

Hey,

I have no experience with Cell machines, but I know that the next PyMVPA
release will have somewhat substantial performance improvements -- you
might get your speed-up for free. Something like two months to go,
though....


Michael


On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 02:37:40PM +0100, Matthias Ekman wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
GPG key:  1024D/3144BE0F Michael Hanke
http://mih.voxindeserto.de