[Rcpp-devel] OpenACC, Rcpp and RStudio on Windows

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 21 January 2018 at 09:55, Emmanuel Hamel wrote:
| Hope you are all feeling good. I have a question. First, I use windows and

Never the easiest platform (in my very personal view).

| I want to use OpenACC. For the moment, I am able to compile GPU Cuda C code
| with Microsoft visual studio and call it from a DLL in Windows. Also, I am
| able to use OpenMP with the Rcpp package. Nevertheless, I want to extend
| these possibilities for a project regarding dynamic hedging program for
| segregated funds. Hence, I would like to know if you have any tips
| regarding the use of OpenACC in Rcpp. In particular, what are the files

I am not aware of anyone using it now.  That said, it would be nice to have.

| that I need to modify in a RStudio project in order to be able to compile
| pragma commands with the OpenACC compiler? For the moment, I use the PGI
| compiler.

That puts a third constraint up.  Which, in aggregate, makes it even less
likely that someone is doing this already.

A few people use Rcpp together with CUDA code.  Charles has been working on
RViennaCL which is another "portable" approach for multiple backends:

  https://cran.r-project.org/package=RViennaCL

He may be following up here too in a day or two.

Other than that, RcppParallel exists, is fairly widely used, and gives you
higher-level abstractions for OpenMP-style parallelism.  No GPU though.

So in short if you need
  - OpenACC
  - on Windows
  - with PGI
you may have to roll up your sleeves and build it.  We will help as we can.

If it were me, I'd relax as many constraints here as possible.  So how about
figuring out how to interface OpenACC on any suitable platform and compiler
pair?

Dirk

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org