platform for number crunching

[Oleg Goldshmidt]

> We should not support hang-vidia

Hmm... How often did it hang on you to deserve the disparaging moniker?

I understand that you may dislike the fact that the good, fast drivers
NVIDIA provide for Linux are proprietary, and the open source drivers
suck in comparison. Is it a good reason to disparage the quality of
their products?

> with our wallet by writing code that can only
> effectively run on their cards. Instead one should use OpenCL that is an open
> standard

Don't mix things up. CUDA is NVIDIA's parallel processing
architecture. It comes with an SDK that has been available for Linux
from the very beginning. OpenCL is a "framework for writing programs".
NVIDIA were instrumental in development of OpenCL, CUDA supports
OpenCL, the two are not exclusive. If you have a CUDA system you can
write in OpenCL or directly in C, Fortran, Python, Java, etc., using
the SDK. As far as I am concerned, it's irrelevant - both the OpenCL
implementation and the SDK come from NVIDIA.

I mentioned CUDA because it is a relevant, and currently dominant, HW
*architecture* for parallel processing, and parallelism seemed to me
relevant to the Shimon's requirement that he called
"number-crunching". I do not know anything about the actual workload
or whether it can benefit from CUDA. If Shimon decides to go down that
road he may decide later whether to use OpenCL or some other language
to write his code - it's a separate topic.

> which is supported fine by ATI cards

And ATI are better than NVIDIA how? IIRC, their drivers are also
proprietary, and open-source drivers (Radeon, etc.) are not as good.
The difference may be less drastic (for some ATI cards) compared to
the open-source NVIDIA drivers, but in principle, is there a
difference?

In terms of GPGPU stuff, to NVIDIA's CUDA ATI have Stream, and they
have a Stream SDK and an OpenCL SDK, which seems to me quite parallel
to NVIDIA's offerings. I'll admit I haven't looked up the license
details, so if you check and say that ATI opensourced everything I'll
be very happy indeed.

> and hopefully will soon have an open-source implementation:

Sorry, but practical considerations may trump ideology, at least until
the latter is adequately supported.

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | pub at goldshmidt.org