[fpc-devel] Parallel Computing

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, Boian Mitov said:
> Very nice wrap on this one Michael.
> While architectures such as OpenMP or CUDA do not solve and don't even try 
> to solve the general case of MT development, they are very powerful in the 
> areas of image processing and DSP. Indeed we are already researching CUDA 
> for usage in our libraries. For those unaware of it, CUDA is the MT API for 
> the NVidia GPUs . My NVIdia comes with 240 cores, and can perform with mind 
> blowing speed fairly complex DSP.

Well, we stuff lighter cards (think 8500,8600) in our vision systems
(passively cooled is better for factory use). 

We are also playing with CUDA, but one of the problems we have is that you
must do pretty heavy transformations to earn back just the transfer of data
to and from videocard memory. Those are too rare for us to dive into that
technology quickly, but I'm keeping notes :)

However if one is more pattern recognition oriented, I can understand that
it could get interesting. 

btw, is CUDA MT, as in that you can have several independant calculations on
the same GPU ?