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

[Matthias Ekman]

Hi,

> 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...
OK... sounds promising. So I'll wait for that release :D

Kind regards,
Matthias
>
> 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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>>     
>
>