Jaideep Singh and Ipseeta Aruni present a GPGPU wrapper for the R statistical computing environment at the R user conference 2010. Their approach is to overload datatypes using R’s simplified wrapper and the SWIG Interface Generator functionality. A full page summary of the approach is available at the conference web site (PDF link).

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