[gmx-developers] GROMACS OpenCL on Gallium

[Vedran Miletić]

2015-11-26 23:32 GMT+01:00 Roland Schulz <roland at utk.edu>:
> It certainly makes sense for us to try new things, to explore technologies
> in an early phase, and find out whether they are useful and drive research.
> But that isn't the issue with OpenCL. I think few people claim that there
> are inherit issues with the OpenCL standard which makes it impossible to get
> good performance. It has to do with the effort put into the implementation.
> As one can see with JavaScript, performance is more in the implementation
> than in the language. So I don't think we need a proof of usefulness at this
> point but the business case for the implementers to put (significant) more
> resources into it. Not sure how we can do that. Because like I said, until
> we actually drop CUDA we aren't an important OpenCL user.
>

There is a less radical solution than dropping CUDA, and that would be
to compile OpenCL by default with GMX_GPU=on and CUDA only if
requested. Whether documented or not, this is likely to frustrate many
users unless OpenCL actually works very well.

Regards,
Vedran

-- 
Vedran Miletić
http://vedranmileti.ch/