Using the Parallella with ‘R’ and OpenCL

[Art R]

Greetings,

I recently received an email which suggested the possibility of a project to port the R Statistical language to the Parallella platform using Open CL. While I am a relatively newbie to R , I am member of a large R users group some of whose members might be interested in contributing to such an exciting project for R.

[censix]

Hi

yes, the idea is to enable R to use the Epiphany parallel processor of the Parallella board as an accelerator, similar to how R can use GPUs as accelerators. One way to do this without having to reinvent the wheel is through OpenCL. just send me a private message on what you have in mind.

Cheers

[juanlp]

Hi censix,

Great tutorial on R and OpenCL. I wonder if MPI interface is already available within E16/64 framework, i.e. doSNOW or doMPI

Thank you,
Juan

[censix]

doMPI is just an R wrapper for MPI, I believe. So as soon as we have a working MPI for the Epiphany we are done.

[juanlp]

Thanks. So it means if we manage to install OpenMPI then it would be ready to go? Sorry, I am new to this parallel world

[censix]

I may have been wrong. looks like 'doMPI' depends on 'Rmpi'. And the latter one I have had not time to look at. You could read the docs and see if it is possible to adapt 'Rmpi' to work with the Epiphany.... Soren

[9600]

[juanlp]

Thanks censix and Andrew, I got answers from both of you

You are correct, my questions came from 2 parts:

- Would MPI be faster than OpenCL, when communicate between the cores on the same board. Though my gut feeling tells me it is OpenCL.
- Next is how to establish the communication between the boards?

Apart from simulation, I am really interested in using this for big-data analysis. Keep up the great works

[svartalf]