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Re: CUDA in Octave 322


From: Jaroslav Hajek
Subject: Re: CUDA in Octave 322
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:54:47 +0200

On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 2:15 PM, Thomas Ilnseher <address@hidden> wrote:
> Am Freitag, den 11.09.2009, 12:17 +0200 schrieb Jaroslav Hajek:
>> You can, of course, use CUDA in your
>> own C++ extensions, but you can't distribute those, because CUDA is
>> not free software.
> Ok, I might be wrong here, but AFAIK Octave uses LAPACK.
>
> As GPL still allows linking against CS "platform libraries", you can
> still link Octave against a CS CUDA enabled LAPACK Lib (granted that
> such a thing exists) when you define LAPACK as a platform library.
>
> Same thing as running *ANY* GPL program on Windowze... (it will link
> against some CS win32 libs dynamically).
>
> Same thing as running a GPL prog on Linux w/ NV or AMD binary driver
> installed.
> ... And So On (tm).
>
> It's the question whether LAPACK is a platform library. IMHO it is (you
> can substitute ATLAS with IMKL AMD something which are CSd).
>
>
> Now you only need a LAPACK lib that exploits CUDA.
>
> Problem here is that you have to  copy data to the GPU's memory nad
> back, call the GPU and so on. This probably gives a reasonable overhead,
> so you'd only accelerate things this way when operating with *LARGE*
> vectors / matrices.
> --
> Thomas Ilnseher <address@hidden>
>
>

It seems to me that you are confusing things.
You can link Octave to whatever you want to, including arbitrary
proprietary libraries. What you typically can't do is to distribute
the resulting binaries, if they are derivative works of the non-free
library used. Proprietary BLAS/LAPACK implementations certainly do not
qualify for the system library exception, but as long as you use
dynamic linking and only standard BLAS/LAPACK calls, there is no
problem because the binary will work with any BLAS/LAPACK.


-- 
RNDr. Jaroslav Hajek
computing expert & GNU Octave developer
Aeronautical Research and Test Institute (VZLU)
Prague, Czech Republic
url: www.highegg.matfyz.cz



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