{
  "id": 1147,
  "title": "Taking Advantage of Special Hardware for Computations",
  "url": "/competitions/WhatDoYouKnow/discussion/1147",
  "author_name": "",
  "post_date": "2011-12-11T14:55:00.060Z",
  "votes": null,
  "comment_count": 3,
  "views": 2938,
  "content": "<p>Am I allowed to offload computations onto some CUDA cores? The particular hardware I will be using costs around $80?&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>I ask this in light of what was said on the prize page &quot;...so that individuals trained in computer science can replicate the winning results.&quot;</p>\r\n<p>As CUDA programming is not very common so someone trained in computer science might not be able to replicate the result with out doing substantial additional training?</p>\r\n<p>I don't want to go through the extra effort of porting my code to CUDA if I could potentially be disqualified.&nbsp;</p>",
  "messages": [
    {
      "id": "7073",
      "postDate": "12/11/2011 14:55:00",
      "content": "<p>Am I allowed to offload computations onto some CUDA cores? The particular hardware I will be using costs around $80?&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>I ask this in light of what was said on the prize page &quot;...so that individuals trained in computer science can replicate the winning results.&quot;</p>\r\n<p>As CUDA programming is not very common so someone trained in computer science might not be able to replicate the result with out doing substantial additional training?</p>\r\n<p>I don't want to go through the extra effort of porting my code to CUDA if I could potentially be disqualified.&nbsp;</p>",
      "rawMarkdown": "",
      "votes": null
    },
    {
      "id": "7078",
      "postDate": "12/11/2011 16:39:02",
      "content": "<p>I dont represent the competition but CUDA isnt exactly that niche. I would imagine GPU usage would be extremely useful in the kinnect competition as well.</p>",
      "rawMarkdown": "",
      "votes": null
    },
    {
      "id": "7080",
      "postDate": "12/11/2011 21:36:52",
      "content": "<p>I hadn't really considered GPU use as a potential issue, but now that you mention it, some of my home-grown ML software does use CUDA (or OpenCL).&nbsp; Speaking of which, I don't suppose anybody has one of those high-end Tesla boards just sitting around looking\r\n for a good purpose (i.e. giving it to me)?&nbsp; Yeah, I didn't think so.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Seriously, though, any good professional code-slinger should be able to decode your CUDA-enabled programs, and even back-port it to CPU-only, as long as it's commented adequately and written in something other than native PTX.</p>",
      "rawMarkdown": "",
      "votes": null
    },
    {
      "id": "7105",
      "postDate": "12/13/2011 19:10:42",
      "content": "<p>Yep -- as long as it's just speeding up computation, it should be fine.&nbsp; We might ask for a translation of what the CUDA portion is doing in CPU-only terms, but (without having written or read anything in CUDA myself) it seems like it shouldn't be a big\r\n deal.</p>",
      "rawMarkdown": "",
      "votes": null
    }
  ],
  "comments": [
    {
      "id": 7078,
      "author_name": "jasontigg",
      "author_url": "",
      "post_date": "12/11/2011 16:39:02",
      "content": "<p>I dont represent the competition but CUDA isnt exactly that niche. I would imagine GPU usage would be extremely useful in the kinnect competition as well.</p>",
      "votes": null,
      "replies": []
    },
    {
      "id": 7080,
      "author_name": "yetiman",
      "author_url": "",
      "post_date": "12/11/2011 21:36:52",
      "content": "<p>I hadn't really considered GPU use as a potential issue, but now that you mention it, some of my home-grown ML software does use CUDA (or OpenCL).&nbsp; Speaking of which, I don't suppose anybody has one of those high-end Tesla boards just sitting around looking\r\n for a good purpose (i.e. giving it to me)?&nbsp; Yeah, I didn't think so.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Seriously, though, any good professional code-slinger should be able to decode your CUDA-enabled programs, and even back-port it to CPU-only, as long as it's commented adequately and written in something other than native PTX.</p>",
      "votes": null,
      "replies": []
    },
    {
      "id": 7105,
      "author_name": "thomaslotze",
      "author_url": "",
      "post_date": "12/13/2011 19:10:42",
      "content": "<p>Yep -- as long as it's just speeding up computation, it should be fine.&nbsp; We might ask for a translation of what the CUDA portion is doing in CPU-only terms, but (without having written or read anything in CUDA myself) it seems like it shouldn't be a big\r\n deal.</p>",
      "votes": null,
      "replies": []
    }
  ],
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}