Book Review: The OpenCL Programming Book

Fixstars Corporation announces a book which starts with the basics of parallelization, covers the main concepts, grammar, and setting up a development environment for OpenCL, concluding with source-code walkthroughs of the FFT and Mersenne Twister algorithms written in OpenCL. It is highly recommended for those wishing to get started on programming in OpenCL.

(The pricing and more information can be obtained Fixstars web pages.)

Extreme Scale Computing

Parallel computing is not a new concept. Its been around for decades. Now the reality is here. Serial computing is dead? Well, that's what was stated in an article in IEEE Computer Magazine.

New technologies just allow for more tools to make solutions possible and/or more efficient. But as far as hardware, that is pretty much the case. Will there be CPU manufacturers making single-core CPUs? That's dead. Hardware development marches on, no looking back.

Now we're talking about millions of cores and peta-scale (10¹⁵) to exa-scale (10¹⁸) operations per second. Massive parallelism has a name -- Extreme Scale Computing (ESC). Just like multicore that had to solve the issue of power consumption and data transfers that led to improvements in data bus transfers technology for example, Extreme Scale Computing has many challenges it must overcome in the next decade: energy and power consumption, and enabling concurrency and locality.

(To read full article visit the drdobbs.com web pages)