TyphoonLabs has released the OpenGL Shader Designer source code, in response to many requests, and in gratitude to the OpenGL community. The source code is released under the LGPL license and can be downloaded from http://www.typhoonlabs.com in the
downloads section. Linux binaries will be released later this month.

The Accelerator GPGPU programming system from Microsoft Research is now available for download. The system was mentioned previously here on gpgpu.org. A key purpose in releasing the software is to get feedback from the gpgpu community about the programming model and the API. Microsoft Research are also interested in building higher level libraries using the system.
(http://research.microsoft.com/downloads. Also see the Accelerator Project Wiki.)

A half-day GPGPU tutorial session was given by Dominik Göddeke and Robert Strzodka in conjunction with the ICCS 2006 conference in Reading, UK. After a comprehensive introduction to the GPU programming model with many examples,possibilities to increase performance and accuracy in GPGPU applications were presented. (Slides and tutorial code)

Abstracts, citations and links to author homepages of eight papers on GPGPU presented at the ICCS conference, Reading, UK, May 2006, are available. Topics include genome sequencing, GPGPU languages, database operations, computational fluid dynamics, computer vision, computational geometry and neural networks. (http://www.mathematik.uni-dortmund.de/~goeddeke/iccs/papers.html)

Rapid evolution of GPUs in performance, architecture, and programmability provides general and scientific computational potential beyond their primary purpose, graphics processing. This work presents an efficient algorithm for solving symmetric and positive definite linear systems using the GPU. Using the decomposition algorithm and other basic building blocks for linear algebra on the GPU, the paper demonstrates a GPU-powered linear program solver based on a Primal-Dual Interior-Point Method. (Cholesky Decomposition and Linear Programming on a GPU, Jin Hyuk Jung, Scholarly Paper Directed by Dianne P. O’Leary, Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, 2006.)

This paper by Govindaraju et al. describes a high-performance FFT algorithm on GPUs. The algorithm is highly tuned for GPUs using memory optimizations. It further improves performance using pipelining strategies. In practice, it is able to achieve 4x higher computational performance on a $500 NVIDIA GPU than optimized single precision FFT algorithms on high-end CPUs costing $1500. (“Efficient memory model for scientific algorithms on graphics processors”, Naga Govindaraju, Scott Larsen, Jim Gray and Dinesh Manocha, UNC Tech. Report 2006)

In this masters thesis by Christian Fenzl (accomplished at the University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt), an easy to use framework is implemented with additional demos to show the main concepts of gpgpu. Furthermore, a demo implementation is included which calculates scores on feature vectors used in a speech recognition system (about 12 times faster than an equivalent cpu implementation). An application with several demos using the framework including the fully documented source code (English) and the paper itself (German) is available. The framework code is recommended especially for gpgpu beginners to look into the OpenGL and DirectX code which shows how gpgpu programs can be developed.

This paper by Dietz et al. from ICCS 2006 details and microbenchmarks the use of pairs of native precision values to obtain higher accuracy results using DSP, SWAR, and GPU hardware. It also dicusses a way to speculatively use lower precision, recomputing with higher precision only when accuracy constraints are not met.(Floating-Point Computation with Just Enough Accuracy)

To focus and facilitate research on real-time ray tracing, a new forum is being created for this rapidly developing field: the 2006 IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing, sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society and the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee (pending). The Call For Participation is now online and contributions on Ray Tracing on GPUs are invited.

This workshop, to be held May 23-24 2006 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, will address some recent developments on new commodity architectures, including GPUs, multi-core CPUs, the Cell processor, PPU and other emerging commodity architectures. Some of the issues to be examined in the workshop include the software challenges that arise in programming these new commodity architectures and their impact on different applications and high-performance computing. The workshop will bring together leading researchers and designers from academia, research labs, industrial organizations and federal agencies. A call for posters is now online. (EDGE Workshop 2006)