gpuRcuda: no installation instructions for Windows machines

[sba22230]

Could you write up the installation instructions so that we can install gpuRcuda on a windows machine.

[cdeterman]

The big issue with Windows is that lack of an nvcc that supports the g++ compiler. NVIDIA has decided that it is too much effort to add that support on Windows instead of requiring users to have the cl compiler from Visual Studio. This doesn't play well with R and is explicitly not supported by Rcpp (see section 2.9 in the FAQS). As such, Windows will not be able to be supported :(

[Emilkindt]

+1 :(
As I understand, I cannot use gpuR with nVidia card /Cuda under Windows, can I?

[cdeterman]

@Emilkindt as I stated before, NVIDIA requires the use of cl on Windows machines. As such, I cannot create a package that would be fully supported by CRAN. The closest that may be possible is somehow creating the dll for the CUDA files separately see instructions here and subsequently loading that as well in the R environment. When I have more time I may try and have a separate git version for the CUDA files that users would need to likely do some additional setup.

My only other thought is to potentially try and use the nvblas library but I have yet to come across someone who could figure out how to use it in Windows either.

[einian85]

I suggest that you mention this non-windows-ness of the package on the first page of the package github repo.