[Numpy-discussion] Accelerating NumPy computations [Was: GPU Numpy]

[Paul Ivanov]

Matthew Brett, on 2009-08-21 11:51,  wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > Indeed. In the future, if OpenCL is the way to go, it may even be
> > helpful to have Numpy using OpenCL directly, as AMD provides an SDK
> > for OpenCL, and with Larrabee approaching, Intel will surely provide
> > one of its own.
> 
> I was just in a lecture by one of the Intel people about OpenCL:
> 
> http://parlab.eecs.berkeley.edu/bootcampagenda
> http://parlab.eecs.berkeley.edu/sites/all/parlab/files/OpenCL_Mattson.pdf
> 
> He offered no schedule for an Intel OpenCL implementation, but said
> that they were committed to it.
> 
> The lectures in general were effective in pointing out what a
> time-consuming effort it can be moving algorithms into the the
> parallel world - including GPUs.  The lecture just passed cited the
> example of a CUDA-based BLAS implementation on the GPU that was slower
> than the CPU version.    Making BLAS go faster required a lot of work
> to find optimal strategies for blocking, transfer between CPU / GPU
> shared memory / GPU registers, vector sizes and so on - this on a
> specific NVIDIA architecture.
> 
> I can imagine Numpy being useful for scripting in this
> C-and-assembler-centric world, making it easier to write automated
> testers, or even generate C code.
> 
> Is anyone out there working on this kind of stuff?  I ask only because
> there seems to be considerable interest here on the Berkeley campus.

This is exactly the sort of thing you can do with PyCUDA, which makes it
so awesome!  
<http://mathema.tician.de/software/pycuda>

In particular, see the metaprogramming portion of the docs:
<http://documen.tician.de/pycuda/metaprog.html>

The metaprogramming section of the slides and source code from Nicolas
Pinto and Andreas Klöckner *excellent* SciPy2009 Tutorials is even more thorough:
<http://conference.scipy.org/static/wiki/scipy09-pycuda-tut.pdf>
<http://conference.scipy.org/static/wiki/scipy09-pycuda-tut.tar.gz>


cheers,
    Paul Ivanov