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

[Yaroslav Halchenko]

On Tue, 15 Dec 2009, Matthias Ekman wrote:
> 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?

well... of cause everything depends on the tasks/goals, BUT swapping
might become very very very expensive in terms of everything ;)  on  a
little cluster I administered, with proper regular harddrives serving as
swaps, I simply forbidden utilization of more memory than there is RAM,
since then tasks would simply run at 2% CPU and swap all the rest of
time (specifics of those tasks I guess -- sequential sweeps
through the RAM, so swapd had to constantly bring something from swap
just for 1 time access, and then swap it out again).

on the other hand, if your RAM mostly occupied by some tasks which do
not need much of resident memory allocated, then swapping might help by
swapping out those unnecessary parts to disk.  Such approach found
itself helpful in many scenarios (e.g. on cell phones ;))

-- 
Yaroslav O. Halchenko
Postdoctoral Fellow,   Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Dartmouth College, 419 Moore Hall, Hinman Box 6207, Hanover, NH 03755
Phone: +1 (603) 646-9834                       Fax: +1 (603) 646-1419
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