On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 6:12 PM, Ludovic Courtès <l...@gnu.org> wrote: > Hi Olivier, > > I understand your point about OpenCL being an open standard, potentially > with implementations for different GPUs, unlike CUDA.
A clarification first: There is much talk about OpenCL here, and I can understand "open standard" and alike qualifications have sort of attractiveness to audience here. However, at the moment tool-chains are equally closed for both OpenCL and CUDA, and I wouldn't expect this to change anytime soon (I don't believe that efforts like Clover could change this). On the other side, CUDA tools are much more mature and usable, so I see no sane reason in any sort of favoring OpenCL here. > However, my point is that there is currently no free software tool to > program NVIDIA’s GPUs. My understanding is that the GCC C.F. seeks to > help free software developers, and to promote free software. Inviting > people to use proprietary software wouldn’t correspond to this goal. I was actually the person that first proposed adding some GPUs back then in January, when Laurent first mentioned that some sort of donation may be available for hardware upgrades (it's even better that NVIDIA is now offering donation of their own). In a further comment on the tracker, though, I mentioned that exactly this sort of concern may arise - as said above, GPGPU development is closed source game at the moment, and it will stay this way for while. So we're facing a dilemma here indeed. One way to proceed would be to say NVIDIA that they stink, and refuse their offer (there is no point in accepting the offer in the hope that free software stack may mature along the way - hardware get obsoleted very quickly in this game, and even in a year or so, one could expect the next generation of much more powerful hardware to appear). Or the fact could be accepted that these devices are really useful in helping people to solve some very important problems; some open-source projects already recognized that, see a list here: http://gpgpu.org/tag/open-source. I'm obviously for later option, but at the end it's on compile farm admins to make the call. Regards, Alex _______________________________________________ Gcc-cfarm-users mailing list Gcc-cfarm-users@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/gcc-cfarm-users
