NEWS: NVIDIA Open-Sources Its CUDA Compiler

From: O. Hartmann <ohartman_at_zedat.fu-berlin.de>
Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 01:02:03 +0100
Just read this on

phoronix.com

Is this finally a chance to get GPGPU on FreeBSD natively supported?

nVidia has a binary driver, supporting well their higher end graphics
cards on FreeBSD 64bit natively.

I do not understand much about the compiler itself, it's "nvcc" as far
as I know, and it is also doing well OpenCL (with some serious bugs we
revealed).

What would be needed to bring FreeBSd finally back to the HPC scenario
with being capable of dealing natively with GPGPU stuff on nVidia
graphics cards? There are libraries installed by the driver or the SDK.
With a OpenSource compiler it should also be possible for nVidia,
assumed the compiler works with freeBSD natively, to provide OpenCL
stuff as well as CUDA stuff.
Please correct me and destroy me "dreams" having FreeBSD in my lab
working on GPUs ...

The decission sounds like some pitfall in a contract. Is nVidia dropping
CUDA in favour of OpenCL or is the CUDA compiler only a tiny piece of
the whole thing that could be easily considered open source without
changing the "great restricted Linux-only" picture?

Maybe LLVM, now part of FreeBSD's backbone, is capable of taking
advantage of the opening of the CUDA compiler so we will see a
combination of CLANG/OpenCL/CUDA soon on FreeBSD introduced by LLVM?

Well, well, this is awesome ... ;-)

Oliver


Received on Wed Dec 14 2011 - 23:02:05 UTC

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