Access to the GPU

JFASI · Post by **JFASI** » Fri Mar 28, 2008 12:18 am

How much access has this project achieved to the CPU? I know that it is blocked off from access by a virtual machine hypervisor, but for my purposes, this might be alright.

I am aiming to use the PS3's powerful GPU for creating a library for high speed matrix operations to add to build on existing supercomputing projects. I do not need more access to the graphics card than to pass small, custom assembly programs to it. Is this king of access also blocked off by the hypervisor?

Is there any place I can find details on the PS3 Linux's implementation of graphics card support, as well as more detailed descriptions of the GPU itself?

Thank you for your time

{edit} Aaaaaaaaaaaand I placed this thread in the wrong forum. Sorry about that. Mods, can we move this to the PS3 Linux discussion?

ouasse · Post by **ouasse** » Fri Mar 28, 2008 7:13 pm

The GPU cannot be used in Linux environment.

For high speed matix computations, better use its powerful Cell processor instead. There's a Cell optimized BLAS library in the Cell SDK (see this document).

JFASI · Post by **JFASI** » Sun Mar 30, 2008 2:49 am

Are all the processors available under Linux? Because that would be great for all sorts of applications.

jimparis · Post by **jimparis** » Sun Mar 30, 2008 6:02 am

1 PPU (2 hardware threads), and 6 SPUs are available.

JFASI · Post by **JFASI** » Mon Mar 31, 2008 10:49 am

Really, now? I had previously thought that most of the cores were blocked off by the hypervisor? This can open up for some interesting possibilities... Thanks a lot

jimparis · Post by **jimparis** » Mon Mar 31, 2008 2:09 pm

Yes, really.
See also the documentation from Sony where it's all described:
http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/geoff/cell/
http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/peop ... ADDON/doc/