Author: Michael Feldman, the editor of HPCwire
As far as technology maturity goes, GPGPU (general-purpose computing on graphics processing units) is just a baby. But there’s already an effort underway to produce an industry standard for this new programming model: OpenCL. With people still kicking the tires on NVIDIA’s CUDA and AMD’s Brook+ GPU programming languages, the effort to come up with a vendor-independent way to access GPUs for computing might seem premature. It isn’t.
For one thing, OpenCL’s ultimate purpose is broader than just GPGPU. It’s real goal is to define a standard low-level API for a whole range of parallel architectures, including GPUs, multicore CPUs, the Cell processor, Larrabee, and DSPs. In fact, OpenCL stands for Open Computing Language, which is about as broad as it gets. The standard will impose some requirements on the hardware, such as the presence of floating-point support (which leaves out integer-only DSPs) and dynamic control flow (which leaves out pure SIMD processors, like ClearSpeed). But the fact that the OpenCL working group includes the biggest players in chip making — Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, IBM, Motorola, Texas Instruments, and others — suggests that the standard will enjoy broad industry support.
