Hi Marek,
> if I understood well, at present only NVIDIA GPUs are supported
> for Amber 11 calculations.
>
> Is there any hope that in close future also support for ATI GPUs will
> be implemented ?
Unfortunately not. It is a sad case of economics here. NVIDIA have been
extremely generous providing hardware for development and testing and more
importantly significant personnel time to work on this project. ATI
unfortunately have not and hence why things are NVIDIA only. Developing an
ATI solution would require, most likely converting to OpenCL. Something that
is actually not as useful or nice to use as CUDA since, from my
understanding, the motivation behind OpenCL is largely for supporting
embedded devices, smart phones, tablets etc, since this is where the market
is moving these days, and the HPC side of things is prominent but secondary
in the design specs here.
This is not insurmountable but would require some form of funding for
development. Supporting both ATI and NVIDIA cards equally would likely make
things less attractive for either party and so funding would need to come
from a more neutral source such as NSF, NIH etc. It might also make access
to NDA'd future technology from either party more tricky to obtain although
this is certainly possible, it just involves more lawyers and paperwork. :-(
If longer term grants can be secured to fully fund this and ongoing
development then there will most likely be an ATI (and Larraby if Intel ever
gets it off the drawing board) supported version but until then there are no
firm plans for this.
Of course if someone writes a cuda compiler for ATI (not too outrageous an
idea!) then it would be easier...
All the best
Ross
/\
\/
|\oss Walker
| Assistant Research Professor |
| San Diego Supercomputer Center |
| Tel: +1 858 822 0854 | EMail:- ross.rosswalker.co.uk |
|
http://www.rosswalker.co.uk |
http://www.wmd-lab.org/ |
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Received on Thu May 13 2010 - 10:00:06 PDT
