"KGPU is a project of the Flux Research Group at the University of Utah. It is supported by NVIDIA through a graduate fellowship awarded to Weibin Sun."
The GPU code seems to be relatively isolated to memory operations in gpuops.cu. Not altogether sure but a quick review suggests such mapping is supported by OpenCL. So one could rewrite that module and the whole thing would work without CUDA. Of course, in terms of compilers it is going to be a while before users can move away from nvcc for nvidia graphics card support.
However, as with the parent I'd really like to see a generic OpenCL vectorization kernel module. Strong suspicion that this work was directly or indirectly underwritten by Nvidia so I guess someone (Intel?) needs to step up and fund similar academic projects.
I wonder if MSFT is subsidizing the cost? Either way it seems that market economics has now dictated that server operating systems are free as in beer.
Academia, of course, gives you entirely different salaries. For an Assistant Prof. job at a good university you are looking at ~65,000 +/- 10k depending on location. This of course is supposed to be for 9 months, but good luck telling your tenure review committee you didn't do any work during the summers. Word is lucrative part-time consulting gigs can be had if you are enterprising. It looks as if you are at about 1/2 of what an industrial lab will pay. But then if you are in the academy, supposedly you care more about freedom than money.