[Beowulf] Inside Tsubame - the Nvidia GPU supercomputer - OpenCL

[Chris Samuel]

----- "Florent Calvayrac-Castaing" <Florent.Calvayrac at univ-lemans.fr> wrote:

> By the way, has anyone on the list any idea on
> the prospects of Apple's OpenCL ?

I think we need something that is hardware independent.

If OpenCL can deliver that (and Apple obviously believe
it can otherwise they'd not have it in Snow Leopard) then
I think that's going to be great.

The big question for me is where are the implementations
going to come from ?

My understanding is that Snow Leopard will use the
LLVM compiler for it [1], and nVidia will ship support
it in their CUDA SDK.

AMD have already nailed their colours to the mast and
based on past behaviour it might be reasonable to expect
that they'll use GCC as their base (which would be nice!).

As for Intel, well I guess it'll be in their compiler,
though I asked about Larabee and OpenCL on the Intel
stand at SC and was told "we don't have anyone here
who knows about it, we'll get someone to call you"
(nothing yet).

cheers,
Chris

[1] - Given that LLVM is BSD licensed it is unclear
whether Apples modifications to implement it will be
public or not.

-- 
Christopher Samuel - (03) 9925 4751 - Systems Manager
 The Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing
 P.O. Box 201, Carlton South, VIC 3053, Australia
VPAC is a not-for-profit Registered Research Agency