[LAD] Linux-audio-dev Digest, Vol 44, Issue 6

[Stéphane Letz]

> 
> Message: 9
> Date: Mon, 04 Oct 2010 13:51:07 +0200
> From: Max Tandetzky <max.tandetzky at uni-jena.de>
> Subject: [LAD] CUDA implementation for calf
> To: linux-audio-dev at lists.linuxaudio.org
> Message-ID: <4CA9BFAB.2090707 at uni-jena.de>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-15; format=flowed
> 
> Hallo,
> 
> I am new here, so I hope this is the right place to talk about what I 
> want to do.
> I want to make a CUDA implementation of the algorithms from the 
> calf-plugins. On the front end there should be placed a button (or 
> something else) to (de-)activate the CUDA support. I have already 
> written a jack-program (which makes some simple changes on audio data) 
> using CUDA. It works good and at a first sight the performance looks 
> promisingly.
> 
> I have read a part of the mailing list archive and found out that there 
> already was a discussion about audio processing with CUDA. I know there 
> are some reasons for not using CUDA like the duty to use the proprietary 
> Nvida driver, the limitation that only people who have an Nvidia card 
> will have a benefit and so on. But the CUDA implementation may show 
> which performance can be reached and may beuseful for Nvidia users 
> immediately.
> I know there is OpenCL but it is not as sophisticated as CUDA at the 
> moment, will have less performance than CUDA and I do not have the time 
> to learn OpenCl at the moment (but the project has to be finished soon). 
> I heard it is not too much work to transfer existing CUDA code to OpenCl 
> code later (assuming there is already an OpenCL implementation for all 
> CUDA functions which were used).
> So I want to do this with CUDA.
> 
> At the moment I have some questions:
> 1. Is there anybody has already done or is doing something like this?
> 2. Where can I get information to make any specific changes on the calf 
> code? (I examined it a bit but it will take time to understand the 
> structure of the program when I only have the code, especially the part 
> for the GUI seems to be conceptualized a bit more complex.)
> 
> It would be nice if I can get some help here.
> 
> Regards
> 
> Max Tandetzky

Hi Max,

I've done some test using OpenCL in the context of the Faust project (http://faust.grame.fr/). Up to now results are not really good, and I guess CUDA/OpenCL will be usable only in specific cases. I'll probably now test if directly using CUDA would give some benefit.  Maybe we can share some ideas?

Stéphane