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

[Matthias Ekman]

Hi,

Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:
>> 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?
>>     
> it is just that JIT compiler psyco is not available for anything else
> than i386 I believe.  pymvpa should work as fine on powerpc architecture
> as on any other. 
>   
OK! Thanks.

>> 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 :-))?
>>     
> Well -- it depends what you are going to do with PyMVPA -- CUDA might
> not provide much of advantage etc.
> if in your case it is multitude of searchlights, I guess kernel
> computations are not that much of a deal since dimensionality of data is
> not high then.  The main issue becomes -- running of multitudes of
> optimizations if you rely on iterative methods (such as SVM).  I think
> there are SVM implementations for CUDA, but I am not sure what
> restrictions they have -- probably would not be able to handle way too
> many samples
>
>   

mmh... OK I see. Thanks for clarifying this point.
Not a PyMVPA related question, but do you think one could handle the 
limited amount of RAM (PS3) with an external flash-drive working as swap?

Bests,
Matthias