Yes, nvidia spends a lot of time and money developing software that induces demand for their GPUs.
I don’t remember any alternatives in uni. Maybe OpenCL but only lightly mentioned
Nah. People teach what they use because that's what's easy.
I'm sure plenty of professors use CUDA in their courses because it's what they actually use. At the same time, in 2013 when I was in college I took a course on "parallel computing" as a CS elective. The professor told us on day 1 that NVidia was sponsoring the course and had donated a bunch of GPUs to the clusters we could remotely connect into for the sake of the class. Naturally we used CUDA exclusively.
I know for a fact that this happened at a lot of schools. I don't know if it's still happening since I'm not in that world anymore, but don't see why it would have stopped.
You can pretty much translate something like https://github.com/jcupitt/opencl-experiments/blob/master/Op... with string replace function names.
Do you have a source for this claim? Or do you simply mean that since they spend money making it better that professors end up using it on their own accord?
Had to buy a new power supply just so I could use it.
which is why it's anti-competitive for a company to sponsor university courses (such as providing educational versions for free). It should be disallowed, unless the course is _specifically_ teaching the software, rather than a general course.
Anti-competitive means others are not allowed to do the same.
it's usually the case where the sponsor is the sole sponsors (aka, the course does not teach both X and Y, esp. if X is given to the uni for free).
It's anti-competitive to allow companies to embed themselves in general courses, despite it not being so by the letter of the laws.
As long as the companies behind X and Y both have a fair shot at sponsorship, this isn't really anti-competitive. It's literally a competition in which the companies compete for student and faculty attention.
Anti-competitive would be a company saying "you must teach X and not Y in your class about Z because you use Xco's mail services" or some other such abuse of one contractual relationship for an unrelated gain.
A competitor can complete for that sponsorship. So long as it's done on direct merit of the value, there's no problem.
Anti-competitive would be providing products or services and forcibly leveraging that into an unrelated contract.
One of our machine learning courses was taught in Matlab.
Unsurprisingly, nobody used Matlab after uni, or 5 years later.
It isn't particularly fast though, and the simplicity quickly becomes an obstacle when solving a real problem.
It’s a great language choice for it
It weeded out the script kiddies who incorrectly signed up wanting a Tensorflow or PyTorch course
It’s a fairly bland and slow but usable language for the task
Shits me off to no end a lot of engineering courses moreorless indoctrinate their students into using it unconditionally, though
Octave exists but is a relative pain to use
Those companies have money to make ‘nice’ things which open source software doesn’t have the time to do.
For 100m you could probably make some pretty sweet clones if amd is hiring anybody to man that position.
that's a little harsh :D
I would posit it's a lack of will rather than time.
Thousands of OSS devs would be willing to devote serious time to it, but can’t/won’t run the gauntlet of starting such a ludicrously large project from scratch
It’s easy to contribute, difficult to be the one organising the contributions
A real “where do I even begin” problem
Nvidia makes software that induces demand for their products. Sometimes that software is a tool, or a platform, or an ML model, or foundational research on algorithms.
That's the first hurdle of working with AMD GPUs, I have no idea what the GPU is actually doing because there is no quality profiler.
Omniverse, Isaac, Metropolis, Rapids, etc.