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Comment by octopus | Hacker News Reader

If you want to program for general GPU devices, you could search for OpenCL (my first comment is valid only for NVIDIA GPU's).

However you should bare in mind that coding for OpenCL is, at least now, an order of magnitude more complicated (personal opinion) than CUDA programming.

With CUDA if you already know C is straightforward to get started.

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Will look into it. I have experience with python, matlab/octave, R, and an itsy bitsy amount of C#/SQL/Java from another life (figuratively).

I think you could use Python for CUDA programming (I didn't tried that), see PyCUDA at:

http://mathema.tician.de/software/pycuda

even Matlab has some bindings for CUDA:

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/matlab_cuda.html

Bare in mind however that the original CUDA implementation uses C, so if you want the last drop of performance you will use C.

Can OpenCL be implemented on systems which do not support CUDA? I have a relatively inexpensive HP bought about 3 years ago that, well, just won't run CUDA even with an nvidia card :-)

I don't think so, better check on NVIDIA forums to be sure ...

If you're still talking about about NVIDIA cards, then no; their OpenCL implementation is based upon the CUDA architecture (technically, CUDA is the device architecture that supports GPGPU programming, not the language itself). That said, videocards are cheap these days, as long as you don't need the high-end: you can snag an entry-level Fermi card (GTS450) for right around $100 these days, or less if you go with something GT200-based.

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