Re: CUDA Sorting

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 20:48, Greg Stark <stark@mit.edu> wrote:
> I don't think we should be looking at either CUDA or OpenCL directly.
> We should be looking for a generic library that can target either and
> is well maintained and actively developed.

I understand your point about using some external library for the
primitives, but I don't see why it needs to support both CUDA and
OpenCL. Libraries for GPU-accelerated primitives generally target
OpenCL *or* CUDA, not both.

As far as I understand (and someone correct me if I'm wrong), the
difference between them is mostly the API and the fact that CUDA had a
head start, and thus a larger developer community around it. (All the
early adopters went to CUDA)

But OpenCL already acts as an abstraction layer. CUDA is
NVIDIA-specific, but OpenCL is supported by AMD, Intel as well as
NVIDIA. It's pretty rare for servers to have separate graphics cards,
but recent Intel and AMD CPUs already have a GPU included on die,
which is another bonus for OpenCL.

So I'd say, the way things are heading, it's only a matter of time
before OpenCL takes over and there will be little reason to look back.

Regards,
Marti