Yesterday I announced the release of my Perl-accessible bindings for CUDA. CUDA is marketed as a massively parallel, high-performance computing architecture. When you think about Perl and high-performance computing, I would hope that PDL, the Perl Data Language, comes to mind. :-)

PDL is a CPAN distribution that gives Perl the ability to compactly store and speedily manipulate the large N-dimensional data arrays which are the bread and butter of scientific computing. Today I will discuss how CUDA::Minimal and PDL talk with each other. (In case you're curious, tomorrow I discuss error handling in CUDA::Minimal.)

Since my first blog post back in December I've written and made thorough use of a simple Perl interface for CUDA. Today, I've posted it on github, and in this post I'll give a relatively simple example of how to use CUDA with Perl via Inline::C. (In case you're wondering, CUDA is a technology provided by nVidia that lets you compile and execute highly parallel code on your CUDA-capable video card.)

First, of course, you'll need to install ExtUtils::nvcc. At the moment this only works with Linux (maybe with Mac OSX, definitely not yet with Windows). It has only been confirmed with Ubuntu. See directions on the ExtUtils::nvcc wiki. (If you manage to install it on other systems, please let me know and edit the wiki or send me your notes!) If you have that installed, installing CUDA::Minimal is just a simple CPAN install.

First Script

So, at this point I will assume you've installed CUDA::Minimal. What can you do with it? Here's a simple example: