The Khronos™ Group today announced the ratification and public release of the OpenCL™ 1.0 specification, the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors found in personal computers, servers and handheld/embedded devices. OpenCL (Open Computing Language) greatly improves speed and responsiveness for a wide spectrum of applications in numerous market categories from gaming and entertainment to scientific and medical software. Proposed six months ago as a draft specification by Apple, OpenCL has been developed and ratified by industry-leading companies including 3DLABS, Activision Blizzard, AMD, Apple, ARM, Barco, Broadcom, Codeplay, Electronic Arts, Ericsson, Freescale, HI, IBM, Intel Corporation, Imagination Technologies, Kestrel Institute, Motorola, Movidia, Nokia, NVIDIA, QNX, RapidMind, Samsung, Seaweed, TAKUMI, Texas Instruments and Umeå University. The OpenCL 1.0 specification and more details are available at http://www.khronos.org/opencl/

A launch event was held Monday night at Austin’s Rio Grande Mexican Restaurant in conjuntion with Supercomputing 2008, to celebrate the newly completed OpenCL specification.  No live demos of OpenCL applications were shown because the OpenCL spec must first be ratified by by all members of the Khronos Group before it can be publicly released.  Still, the fact that this group has completed the complex specification in less than six months is nothing less than amazing.  Macworld has posted an article discussing the event including interviews with members of the OpenCL working group.  More information about OpenCL is available at the Khronos Group Website.

From a press release:

ATI Stream is a set of advanced hardware and software technologies that enable AMD graphics processors (GPU), working in concert with the system’s central processor (CPU), to accelerate many applications beyond just graphics. This enables better balanced platforms capable of running demanding computing tasks faster than ever*.

November 13 News Summary

• On December 10, AMD plans to release for download a free ATI Catalyst™ driver update that instantly unlocks new ATI Stream acceleration capabilities already built into millions of ATI Radeon™ graphics cards.
• ATI Stream-enabled software titles for entertainment, gaming and productivity are being released or are under development by a growing list of the world’s top independent software vendors (ISVs), including ArcSoft and CyberLink.
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CAL.NET is an effort to create a library to allow existing .NET applications access ATI/AMD GPU hardware for computational and graphical purposes. Programmers are able to manage the GPU hardware and execute kernels on it transparently. It is currently supported on Windows and Linux platforms with the latest drivers.

The latest release of CUDA.NET, 2.0.3, addresses issues with the previous release and adds many features including CUDA runtime API support and Direct3D/OpenGL interoperability. It is now possible to create hybrid applications with Tao and SlimDX, and an issue with copying vector data from device memory was fixed on Windows.

Date: Monday November 17th 2008 – 5:30pm to 6:30pmLocation: Rio Grande Mexican Restaurant – right across the street from SC08

OpenCL is a royalty-free, open standard being created by the Khronos Group for programming heterogeneous parallel computing across GPUs and CPUs. OpenCL is being driven by industry-leading companies including AMD, Apple, ARM, Codeplay, Ericsson, Freescale, Imagination Technologies, IBM, Intel, Nokia, NVIDIA, Motorola, RapidMind and Texas Instruments. OpenCL enables portable programming of the emerging intersection of GPU and multi-core CPU compute capability and is designed to support a wide range of applications, from consumer software all the way to HPC solutions, through a low-level, high-performance, device-independent abstraction. This informal gathering will provide one of the first opportunities for the HPC community to gain an insight into the architecture and direction of this exciting development. Tex-Mex appetizers and cold beer will be provided! Please register early as seating is limited – we look forward to seeing you in Austin!

(OpenCL Briefing Registration at khronos.org)

CUDA.NET version 2.0 is now available for download. Changes from CUDA.NET 1.1 include full support for the CUDA 2.0 API, support for double precision data types, the latest BLAS routines from CUDA 2.0, and some minor bug fixes. (CUDA.NET)

CUDA.NET is an effort by GASS to provide access to NVIDIA CUDA functionality through .NET applications. The library currently provides .NET bindings for CUDA functions, allowing programmers to use existing .NET applications as hosts for CUDA enabled devices, this way exposing a strong co-processor that can be used with .NET. The current distribution contains a .NET library that can be used from any .NET application and language, along with examples in C# and Python showing how to use the library. The API is very straightforward and compatible with the NVIDIA CUDA API available for C applications with few modifications to ease development and align with .NET standards. See the CUDA.NET home page for more details.

This Ph.D. thesis by Jansen describes a GPGPU development system that is embedded in the C++ programming language using ad-hoc polymorphism (i.e. operator overloading). While this technique is already known from the Sh library and the RapidMind Development Platform, GPU++ uses a more generic class interface and requires no knowledge of GPU programming at all. Furthermore, there is no separation between the different computation units of the CPU and GPU – the appropriate computation frequency is automatically chosen by the GPU++ system using several optimization algorithms. (“GPU++: An Embedded GPU Development System for General-Purpose Computations“. Thomas Jansen. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Munich, Germany.

CUDPP is the CUDA Data Parallel Primitives Library for NVIDIA CUDA. CUDPP is a library of data-parallel algorithm primitives such as parallel-prefix-sum (“scan”), parallel sort and parallel reduction. Primitives such as these are important building blocks for a wide variety of data-parallel algorithms, including sorting, stream compaction, and building data structures such as trees and summed-area tables. The first beta release of CUDPP is now available, as is the searchable online documentation.

According to an article on Extremetech.com , French company GPU-Tech has announced Ecolib, a series of C++ libraries for GPGPU which target both ATI and NVIDIA GPUs. A PDF describing the API is available. Their download page includes demo software with code samples and workstation CPU/GPU benchmarking tools.