dorsal team mailing list archive

[Fredrik Heffer Valdmanis <fredva@xxxxxxxxxx>]

2011/11/23 Harish Narayanan <harish.mlists@xxxxxxxxx>

> On 11/23/11 1:57 PM, Fredrik Heffer Valdmanis wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > As part of my master's, I am extending Dolfin to make use of PETSc's
> > CUDA support. My work will hopefully be merged into Dolfin 1.1, and it
> > would be nice to have Dorsal build PETSc 3.2 with support for CUDA.
> >
> > I have branched Dorsal and tried to implement this. It fetches a few
> > extra packages, but I am not sure if it can (or should) fetch and build
> > the CUDA toolkit. Right now, the user must install the CUDA toolkit
> > manually, then modify the chosen platform file to contain the variable
> > CUDA_DIR, and add "cusp" and "thrust" packages to the list. This kind of
> > manual configuration by the user is of course not optimal, does anyone
> > have any input on how this can be done better?
> >
> > If we could detect the presence of the CUDA compiler (nvcc) on the
> > user's path and check that it meets the minimum version requirement,
> > could we then set CUDA_DIR and add cusp and thrust to the list of
> > packages automatically?
> >
> > My branch is at lp:~fredva/dorsal/dorsal-gpu. The changes are in {petsc,
> > cusp, thrust}.package.
> >
> > It's stil a long time before Dolfin 1.1, so there is no rush getting
> > this into Dorsal. It would be nice for developers wanting to test the
> > GPU code though.
>
> I am interested in this, but I am going to wait until after Dorsal is
> thoroughly tested to build FEniCS 1.0.
>
> There are lot of other interesting things waiting to be merged too,
> including support for Intel compilers and the ability to build other
> FEMy projects like Deal.II and Dune. Everything in good time.
>
> Thanks. I was a bit unclear in my previous email, I wasn't hoping for a
merge anytime soon. What I wanted to know is what you think about this way
of doing it? Do you have any suggestions for improvements? It would be good
for me to improve on the design so that it is more or less ready for
merging when my Dolfin code gets released sometime in the distant future.
If the timing is bad we can discuss it later, I just wanted to air my
thoughts about it :)

Garth, I see your point about the complications. That requires some
thinking.

-- 
Fredrik