并行值得期待

今天看到不少的新闻关于OpenCL会在将来大放异彩的来之“苹果”方的消息：

http://www.macworld.com/article/136921/2008/11/opencl.html 这就是一条

OpenCL gets touted in Texas

Open graphics standard to be featured in OS X Snow Leopard

by Dale Roe, Macworld.com

Though the “techlectic” SC08 crowd at Austin’s Rio Grande Mexican Restaurant Monday night was thirsty for cold beer and hungry for nachos and quesadillas, they were equally famished for information on OpenCL, the Apple-spearheaded parallel computing API produced by the Khronos Group. Not much has been revealed about the C programming language-based specification since Apple announced at this June’s Worldwide Developer Conference that OpenCL would be a linchpin of the next major OS X release, code-named Snow Leopard. OpenCL’s addition the Mac OS would, according to Apple, allow applications to “tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU computing power previously available only to graphics applications.”

If the attendees seemed impatient, it wasn’t for lack of speed on Khronos’ part, explained Nvidia’s Neil Trevett, Khronos’ president.

“If you go to some other larger standards bodies, it’s quite normal for a standard to take five years or more,” Trevett said. “That’s quite commonplace. You actually have to really push to get it down to eighteen months. Our record was 12 months, up to now; we’ve done this one in six.”

……

在OpenCL最新的网页上也可以看到他们会在sc08的简单的ppt内容

http://khronos.org/opencl/

看来苹果是要作出强有力的手段措施来推出OpenCL，不过也有嫌疑是来配合OS X Snow Leopard的销售。

不过看AMD最近的stream的改版，全部重写了brook+的代码，在gpu通用计算上也赶上来。

不过看过这条新闻：

http://www.nvidia.com/object/io_1227010734073.html

Mathematica Users Get 100x Performance Boost From NVIDIA CUDA

World’s Most Powerful Global Computation Software Now GPU Accelerated

For further information, contact:

Andrew Humber
NVIDIA Corporation
[phone]
[e-mail]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SC08—AUSTIN, TX—NOVEMBER 18, 2008—At SC08, Wolfram Research will demonstrate a new version of Mathematica, the world’s most powerful general computational software, that integrates CUDA®, NVIDIA’s parallel GPU computing architecture. This new version is expected to give Mathematica users an unprecedented performance increase of 10-100X in numerical computing, modeling, simulation and visual computations, without the need to learn or write C code.

“Since its initial release, Mathematica has been adopted by over 3 million professionals across the entire global technical computing community, and it has had a profound effect on how computers are used across many fields,” said Joy Costa, director of global partnerships at Wolfram Research. “The prospect of a hundred fold increase in Mathematica 7 performance is staggering. CUDA enabled Mathematica will revolutionize the world of numerical computation.”

“With Mathematica 7, researchers and scientists can easily tap the enormous parallel processing power of NVIDIA GPU’s through a familiar high level interface,” said Andy Keane, general manager of the GPU Computing business at NVIDIA. This is truly transformative, giving Mathematica users computational horsepower like never before and reducing computation time in some cases from days to a matter of minutes.”

这则新闻也表明AMD和OpenCL要赶上CUDA还有一段的路要走。

接下来的几年里面Nvidia，AMD，苹果的OpenCL，intel，这些厂商将会在高性能通用编程平台上的竞争更加白热化，接下来一些语言的并行特性的加入，更会对正常并行开发革命带来活力。

并行……值得期待