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Comment by gnu8 | Hacker News Reader

Why is this cuda and not OpenCL? There's no reason to legitimize nvidia's proprietary nonsense, it just enables their bad behavior.

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The GPU code seems to be relatively isolated to memory operations in gpuops.cu. Not altogether sure but a quick review suggests such mapping is supported by OpenCL. So one could rewrite that module and the whole thing would work without CUDA. Of course, in terms of compilers it is going to be a while before users can move away from nvcc for nvidia graphics card support.

However, as with the parent I'd really like to see a generic OpenCL vectorization kernel module. Strong suspicion that this work was directly or indirectly underwritten by Nvidia so I guess someone (Intel?) needs to step up and fund similar academic projects.

Suspicion confirmed:

"KGPU is a project of the Flux Research Group at the University of Utah. It is supported by NVIDIA through a graduate fellowship awarded to Weibin Sun."

http://code.google.com/p/kgpu/

It really makes you wonder why AMD does not do the same thing; the hw is essentially free and how much could a fellowship cost. Does anyone know if research grants like this are a tax write-off?

CUDA is older and more popular: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#cat=0-5&q=opencl%2C...

Nonetheless, it's a bad idea to favor proprietary languages that lock you into a particular company's products.

CUDA should have died when OpenCL came about.

Of course since such lockin is to Nvidia's benefit, it's understandable why they keep promoting their proprietary solution...

Like what, you mean instantly? What if OpenCL sucked? Should CUDA still die?

What sort of vitriol is this? How dare they invent a new technology and build an API to it.

Didn't you know all good API's are designed from scratch in open committees, instead of being standardized after multiple competing implementations?

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