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Possibilities of Igor regarding GPU based calculations

Thu, 04/10/2014 - 04:13 am

Dear Forum users,

currently my group is thinking about buying another unit to perform calculations using igor. The question is: Which architectural features should the new machine have? Since the nature of the said operations are mainly convolutions and other operations of this kind I was asking myself if a machine with a strong GPU might be an option. Does igor have some kind of interface for this?

Kind regards

thomas_braun

Hi karius,

In http://www.igorexchange.com/node/1489 are some benchmarks posted. I'm not aware of any GPU acceleration support in Igor Pro 6.

In case you have a benchmark function for your new machine, I'd be happy to run it on my machine and post the results.

April 10, 2014 at 06:42 am - Permalink

741

Reading this post, I've decided to finally release my IgorCL XOP. I use it to run OpenCL calculations from Igor. It's available from http://www.igorexchange.com/project/IgorCL.

OpenCL calculations can run on a pretty broad range of devices. With IgorCL you can compute on Intel/AMD CPUs and Intel/NVidia/AMD GPUs.

IgorCL is low-level. You will need to be an advanced programmer with familiarity with OpenCL to use it. I provides no benefit to the vast majority of Igor users out there.

karius wrote:
Since the nature of the said operations are mainly convolutions and other operations of this kind

Convolution is a typical example of a problem that translates well to OpenCL. There's plenty of OpenCL code out there that you could combine with IgorCL.

April 11, 2014 at 02:41 am - Permalink