Cuda on PS3 ?

Accelerated Computing CUDA CUDA Programming and Performance
1

Hi,

I do not have access to the nvidia card to run/create cuda apps.

  1. Can I use cuda on a PS3 ?

  2. If I use the simulator of cuda to implement a computational-finance/image-processing algorithm, then is there a work-around to do a comparative study of the runtimes of the application on the cuda-simulator and the same on the single-cpu ? (I feel this study will not be possible obviously because its just a simulator i am using. Then again, any suggestions/alternative options on this might help)

TIA.

Regards,
Balkrishnan

2

I would be very surprised if you could.

(1) The GPU in the PlayStation is a custom GPU developed just for the

playstation. It was based on the Nvidia GeForce 7800 Architecture (at

least according to wikipedia), and this GPU does NOT seem to be

capable of running CUDA apps.

(2) You would need driver support to launch the CUDA apps. Since

there was never any goal/point in doing CUDA work on a PS3, I’d

be surprised if the driver supported it, even if the chip did (which I

don’t think it does).

-Mark Roulo

3

I heard that one of the research groups at Georgia Tech experimented with building a PTX compiler for the cell processor (used in the PS3), but I think you’d be better off trying to get an older CUDA-enabled card to work with (even if it’s an old 8600GT or something).

There’s really no way to compare the simulator and the single-threaded CPU version, since the simulator is much slower due to the overhead of the debugging symbols and the GPU emulation. Also, if you do a lot of development on the emulator without trying it on a real hardware device, you’re probably going to end up with some nasty race conditions that you won’t find in the emulator (it’s not cycle-accurate).