Bjorn Andersson has an excellent blog post on the trends of tools to utilize multicore/manycore processors as well as accelerators such as GPUs.
“There are many similarities with that and where the HPC industry has been with the use of accelerators and many/multi-core in parallel systems. It’s been a journey from having only those low level or hardware specific tools available for the really dedicated to where we now have several approaches to upleveling it to a point where the application developer can have essentially one source code and let the “system” take care of translating it in such a way that they take maximum (or close enough) advantage of the hardware it runs on.”
“Apart from Intel/RapidMind; take a look at what Nvidia is doing with CUDA, OpenCL and integration with PGI compilers; what Convey Computer is doing with their HC-1 system; and for that matter what Apple and Microsoft are doing for promoting common API’s (OpenCL and DirectX Compute respectively).”
“We’re at an inflection point where the use of various type of accelerators now is easy enough for developers and we’re getting to a point where it’s also easy to deploy. Essentially providing “stealth acceleration” where it “just works” almost regardless of what hardware you have.”
