R is a popular open source environment for statistical computing, widely used in many application domains. The ongoing  R+GPU project is devoted to moving frequently used R functions, mostly functions used in biomedical research, to the GPU using CUDA. If a CUDA-compatible GPU and driver are present on a user’s machine, the user may only need to prefix “gpu” to the original function name to take advantage of the GPU implementation of the corresponding R function.

Speedup measurements of the current implementation range as high as 80x, and contributions to the code base are cordially invited. R+GPU is developed at the University of Michigan’s Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Institute