Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/6960
OpenCL and CUDA are relatively new and evolving, and more work has to be done to make them easier to use. Microsoft and Nvidia have pushed the ball further with the develop- ment of Nexus, a programming tool that works within Visual Studio to let developers access CPU and GPU cores and also analyze the ways in which these cores are working in the app. e ability to off er these sophisticated ca- pabilities in a mainstream programming tool like Visual Studio is huge. We expect more to come from Microsoft to enable work that takes advantage of DirectX 11, which sup- ports heterogeneous computing. ATI's Stream Computing group has developed an SDK that also includes analysis, but so far Nvidia has made the most strides in tool development. Intel knows this, as well. e company an- nounced its own development tool at SC09 called Ct. It's a dialect of C+ and will like- wise enable developers to spread code across CPU- and GPU-based processors. Compli- ant with CUDA and with OpenCL, Ct is an example of the kind of work being done at Intel that goes beyond Larrabee. It's go- ing to needed in order to enable the work of the tera-scale group and of future processors from Intel that combine GPU and CPU. So, let's go back to visit those high priests of computing. ey're still with us; in fact, some of them are the same people, but they've changed, too. ey are our friends. ey are the people working in universities, in the Khronos Organization, and at the major hard- ware and software companies to make super- computing everyday computing. Some of the changes we can see right now are in faster video performance, faster trans- coding, jazzy heads-up displays, instant imag- ing adjustments, and, of course, better game- play. In the next go-round, all those processors available out there will be working on science projects, but they'll also be available to perform analysis and render in the cloud, letting us try out new materials on our couches. e diff er- ences between HPC and mainstream comput- ing will fade, and access to more power will be like turning on a light switch. ■ Kathleen Maher is a contributing editor to CGW, a senior analyst at Jon Peddie Research, a Tiburon, California-based consultancy specializing in graphics and multimedia, and editor in chief of JPR's "TechWatch." She can be reached at Kathleen@jonpeddie.com. (Top) A supernova shock wave and (bottom) neutron experiments are some of the projects being performed with supercomputers. February 2010 39 Computing ■ ■ ■ ■ Images ©Oak Ridge National Laboratory.