[marmaduke]

Typical simulations for us take between half a minute and several days, but this can depend because it's typically necessary to do a parameter sweep in several dimensions (leading in extreme cases to runtimes of several months on a cluster).

I believe Thrift (now shipped w/ CUDA SDK) makes things easier, but (since you know Python) nothing like NumPy exists in C++ and PyCUDA maps NumPy seamlessly into GPU computing, which is a big win.

[pwang]

If you are getting good results from CUDA and PyCUDA, you might want to take a look at Numba and NumbaPro: http://numba.pydata.org and http://continuum.io/numbapro. They are still in their early stages but work pretty well on a number of cases. Here is an example of what NumbaPro can do: http://docs.continuum.io/numbapro/generalizedufuncs.html#gen...

Numba is completely open source. NumbaPro is not open source, but it is free for academic users.