Mathematica 8 Beta - New GPU Integration with CUDALink
At the beginning of the REU, all of us were given prerelease versions of Mathematica 8 to try out especially its new CUDALink capabilities. Required for this to work is a proper graphics card (late model NVIDIA GPU), Visual Studio 2008 (available free for students from Microsoft Dreamspark, and the CUDA Toolkit (available free on the NVIDIA CUDAZone website). Due to the fact that I was the only member with a sufficient graphics card (1GB PNY GeForce 9600GT), I would be the one in charge of testing CUDALink.
Our long term interest was a 3D example that would employ CUDALink and display in the Cube. Due to some complexities with the different versions of the beta, the immediate interest soon became to find something that worked, with the hope that it could be applied to a 3D example we could display in the Cube. With the help of Abdul Dakkak, we did obtain several examples (see screenshot at left) and a method of adaptation so that they may work. The 3D example we were aiming for was an Ising Model, which illustrates electron spins during a variation in temperature. However I determined that caveMathematica was not yet capable of displaying listed objects in the Cube (it currently can handle only surfaces) so an Ising Model, which is essentially a 3D array, would not be work with this framework. This is another aspect which we would like to improve in a new version of CubeMathematica.