Drop-in GPU Acceleration of GNU Octave

Re:Drop-in GPU Acceleration of GNU Octave by seiji on Thursday September 11, 2014 @06:02PM (#8305433)

All nvidia did was make an API compatible BLAS library with automatic GPU offloading. Other programs using BLAS functions then get automatically GPU accelerated. Nobody altered octave. They just LD_PRELOAD it in place. The same thing works with R too.

The goal is "have software that works," not "have software that retains ideological purity at the cost of advancement."

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Re:Drop-in GPU Acceleration of GNU Octave by aw3c2 on Thursday September 11, 2014 @06:18PM (#8305517)

That's your goal. In my opinion our goal as society should absolutely be software that everyone can "run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve".

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Re:Drop-in GPU Acceleration of GNU Octave by melling on Thursday September 11, 2014 @06:44PM (#8305628)

That's great. However, we'll all be dead and the job still won't be finished. I'm all for free software but the "Stallman method" is going to take a couple of lifetimes. Being a little practical will address the real problem of expensive software. I've been an Emacs user for 20 years but these days I find myself using Sublime and IntelliJ much more often. I think we're all better off if we also support good commercial and create a competitive environment

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Re:Drop-in GPU Acceleration of GNU Octave by RichardFord on Thursday September 11, 2014 @10:19PM (#8306313)

There is no "our goal as society". But the vast majority of people that care about running Matlab, Octave don't share your goal.

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