Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] CUDA GPU Vs CELL BE

[Eric Blossom]

On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 05:21:29PM +0200, Vincenzo Pellegrini wrote:
> Hi everybody,
> I have recently had a look at two possibilities for SWRadio-aimed  intensive
> computing,
> which i guess are the two main development lanes for our kind of stuff:
> 
> .:. Cell BE platform
> .:. CUDA & nVidia GPUs
> 
> I think this list is the best place to for a discussion on PROs and CONs of
> the two solutions,
> but couldn't find any by searching the mailing list.
> 
> has this been discussed already?

There's been a lot of conversation about this stuff, but mostly off list.

Many of us are hoping that Larrabee turns out to be a big winner.

The Cell BE is pretty cool, and fun to program, but I'm not sure how
much of a future it has.

I'd say the court is still out on CUDA with regard to signal
processing applications.  From my reading of the CUDA docs, it looks
like you need a very "data parallel" application to take good
advantage of it.  Again from reading, it appears that you need at
least 64 elements that you can apply an instruction to, to be in it's
target zone.  For certain parts of our graphs, this is probably OK
(e.g., FEC decode, FIR's, FFTs), but I'm kind of dubious about
anything with a depedency chain (IIR's, PLLs, equalizers, etc.)  I'm
also not sure if you can launch multiple kernels simultaneously
(CUDA-speak).  If you could launch multiple kernels, we'd have a
better chance of using the parallelism.  That said, more experimenting
should be done with GPUs to see if they can be made useful for signal
processing.

> regards to all gr-fellows
> vincenzo

Eric