[Bf-committers] CUDA backend implementation for GSoC?

[Timothy Baldridge]

Okay, then if we were going to move forward on this, I see one
remaining hang-up (minus the coding needed) we need to find a way that
we can use OpenCL style code in the CPU. IMO, we're going to run into
issues in the future if we have two sets of code, unacellerated C and
OpenCL. If we can get a software OpenCL implementation for Blender we
get 2 things:

1) a standardized code base - no need for C and OpenCL code
2) a performance boost for multi-cpu systems as OpenCL would be very
easy to scale across multiple cores.

I don't hear any talk (besides from Apple via Grand Central) of such a
project. So perhaps we need to start one? I took a look at the APIs
released by Khronos, and it's fairly simple to implement on a CPU. The
only real interesting part would be translating the kernel sourcecode
into C and compiling it into CPU code on the fly. We could either
write our own parser for the OpenCL kernel code and use LLVM to
translate it into machine code, or translate the kernel code into C
and compile it via GCC/MSVC. Either way we're talking a separate
project.

I'm interested in heading this up, and I'm going to try to find some
support at the LLVM forums. Anyone here interested?

Timothy