Wow! Jacket is now running MATLAB on a GPU cloud server from Penguin Computing! We were setting up demos today at SuperComputing 2009 and just got things setup inside Penguin Computing’s booth. Jacket is now running as compiled MATLAB code on Penguin Computing’s POD (Penguin on Demand) cloud service! The OpenGL visualizations are running without a hitch through VGL, so for everyone on the forums, this seems like another effective method of running Jacket remotely — at least on Linux. Does anyone know if VGL runs under windows? Penguin Computing was using it quite effecitvely – their setup was very slick!
Developer SDK Upgrade
In Jacket v1.1, an optional Developer SDK Upgrade is available. This upgrade provides the ability for you to integrate custom CUDA code for use with MATLAB. With a few simple jkt functions (which mimic standard MEX API functions), you can integrate custom CUDA kernels into Jacket. This task is as simple as replacing the main function in your program with jktFunction, which is used in the place of mexFunction for integration of CUDA code into MATLAB and Jacket. This serves an an entry point to Jacket’s runtime. Within a jktFunction, you have access to several jkt API functions to do tasks such as getting input from MATLAB, allocating device memory, calling the CUDA kernels, and casting the kernel’s output to …
Commentary on Jacket v1.1
I’m pleased to announce the release of Jacket v1.1! This release represents a major milestone in Jacket’s development and a great boost in functionality for Jacket customers. The major feature of this release is the inclusion of new GPU datatypes, most notably double-precision. We are very pleased with the performance we’ve seen for double-precision computations. At the time of this writing, the NVIDIA Tesla T10 series is the newest GPU on the market and NVIDIA’s first in what will become a great line of double-precision enabled GPUs. Even on this first double-precision generation card, we are seeing ~20x speedups for a lot of our examples and test cases. Of course, GPUs still give higher speedups when comparing single-precision GPU to …
The NVIDIA MEX-Plugin & Jacket
One of the first questions people ask when considering Jacket for GPU MATLAB computing is the following: How is Jacket different from the MATLAB plugin on the NVIDIA website (found here: http://developer.nvidia.com/object/matlab_cuda.html)? The short answer to this is that the NVIDIA MEX-plugin requires you to write CUDA code, while Jacket does not. This has many implications and ends up resulting in a lot of advantages for you as a MATLAB programmer. First let’s describe the features of the MEX-plugin: You write CUDA code that solves your problem. You use the MEX configuration files provided by NVIDIA to compile your CUDA code into a MEX file that is callable by MATLAB. MATLAB calls your MEX file, moves data out to the …