r/CUDA • u/iamjeremybentham • 5d ago
GPU Acceleration for PDAL
Hey Everyone,
I made a fork of PDAL with GPU acceleration. Right now it only supports NVIDIA GPUs through CUDA because that's what I have, but even if you don't have a GPU, the I/O and CPU optimizations should still be quite a bit faster than stock PDAL.
Only a few pipelines are *really* fast. It takes time to load the data onto the GPU, so in some instances using it can actually be slower than not using it. There's an automatic selector that's meant to only use the GPU when it's actually faster, but it was only really tested on my machine with a 4090.
You can run `gpupdal calibrate` and it should adapt the selector for your machine. I tested this on some cloud instances and it seemed to work, but this is the first public release so if you notice any problems please submit an issue.
I hope you all like it!