[SoC] Interested in GPU-based processing

[Hamish]

Seth wrote:
> Thanks for the replies all! Looking
> at the wiki page, it looks like r.proj and v.proj are
> already there. I'd also be interested in working on r.sun
> (it's related to my thesis). However, I'm concerned that
> there isn't enough time in a SoC project to translate many
> modules.

An important part of the process is learning to estimate how
long a job will take. The mentors may have more experience in
this so have a bit of a responsibility to let you know if it
looks like you are proposing to bite off more than a sane human
could chew, or if what you are proposing looks like 2 weeks work
and not a summer's worth @ full-time. 

so try to set what looks like a reasonable and well thought
out timeline in your application, and expect some feedback.
the more detailed and well thought out the timeline is, the more
confidence we'll have that you can excel in the SoC, as good
planning and self-motivation is really important due to the
telecommuting aspect of it. Be warned that passing the midterm
requires more than just vapourware and promising code chunks;
students should plan to have a working prototype or completed
milestones by then.

w.r.t. which modules to choose, an idea might be to start simple
in the first half of the summer and work your way to more
difficult ones once you are more comfortable with the project's
codebase and what you need to do with it. No one expects you
to tackle *everything* on the ideas page wish list. I would
definitely encourage you to work on things with direct relevance
to your degree- for one thing you'll be much more motivated to
make sure it works properly :) and for another it'll be easier
to convince your univ. advisor that taking time out to work on
this is a good idea (getting to know the model internals etc).
Just so long as it is win-win and not so esoteric that the
proposed project is not really useful or interesting to the
rest of the community.


> How long will it take to alter the build process to detect
> an OpenCL install?

the dev teams are here to help with integration, don't freak
out about that too much. (especially for anything that touches
core libraries/build scripts you can expect them to have give
strong guidance)


Hamish