Re: Gsoc 2020 Idea Discussion

[Matthias W. Klein]

On 25.02.20 18:12, John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 2/25/20 9:53 AM, Atharva Dubey wrote:
>
> > Therefore I thought giving Cuda support to octave would be nice.
>
> It would be better to have free software that allows us to work with
> this class of specialized hardware.
>
> > Please share your thoughts on it.
>
> I recommend that you begin by reading the "Combining work with code
> released under the GNU licenses" section of the GPL FAQ.
>
> https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html
>
> jwe
I am also not a lawyer and cannot discuss licensing.

Concerning the use of accellerating hardware, an existing free standard
is OpenCL [1].  As of 2020, there are various free and open source
implementations of the OpenCL standard around [2]. Besides them, there
are many proprietary ones, including Nvidia/Cuda ones.

As of end of last January, the ocl package [3] is part of octave forge. 
It provides a (limited) support for OpenCL in octave.  The user can
choose which of the above mentioned implementations to (manually install
and) use with ocl.

I have been using the ocl package also with Nvidia GPU hardware.

@Atharva: This post only concerns the hardware backend.  However, you
might want to consider if your ML/DL development in octave may be suited
to be based on an existing (but rather new) octave package.

Best,
Matt

[1] https://www.khronos.org/opencl/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL#Open_Source_implementations
[3] https://octave.sourceforge.io/ocl/index.html