COMPASS

h1. The YoGA plugin

YoGA is a plugin for "Yorick":http://dhmunro.github.com/yorick-doc/ built on top of "NVIDIA's CUDA toolkit":http://developer.nvidia.com/category/zone/cuda-zone. It provides GPU acceleration from within the Yorick environment for a number of applications (Fourier transform, matrix operations, random number generation, etc ..). 

h1. Why CUDA ?

Yoga is built on top of the CUDA toolkit which is NVIDIA proprietary software. It is however freely available from NVIDIA's website. CUDA has been receiving a lot of support from NVIDIA and the GPGPU community in general and provides a large collection of tools to perform scientific computing (cufft, cublas, curand). Moreover, several libraries like cudpp or MAGMA have been developed using CUDA and provide additional functionalities very useful for scientific computing. CUDA thus appeared to us as the best option to quickly deploy a general toolkit for a "GPU accelerated Yorick".

The drawback is Yoga being doomed to be used on computers equipped with NVIDIA GPU card. You'll find here the list of CUDA-capable video cards : http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_gpus.html Yoga has been tested on a variety of platforms, from laptops to servers with various grades of GPU cards from mobile series to high-end scientific-grade cards.

Concerning the OS, Yoga has been tested on linux and Mac OS with success. The following instructions apply for both.

[[Install YoGA]]

[[YoGA phylosophy]]

[[Practice YoGA]]

[[YoGA features]]

[[Benchmarks]]

!{width:10%}https://projets-lesia.obspm.fr/attachments/download/691/yoga_carre_NB.png!