Despite begin a unique, key marketing feature of Snow Leopard, Apple has decided to open the code behind Grand Central Dispatch under the liberal Apache 2.0 license. Snow Leopard's new Grand Central Dispatch feature, which serves as a system-wide mechanism for managing parallel task execution across multiple processor cores for developers, involves multiple components in the operating system.
The chipmaker is teaming up with content developer OTOY to develop and deploy applications, high-definition (HD) content and even games in the cloud using a massively-parallel supercomputer.
The buzz has been loud at times. Almost sounds to good to be true. Use your video card for HPC and get a 10, or maybe even 50 times, speed up of your application. Those kind of comments get my attention. Initially there were some skeptics, but the results keep coming. And, the results were not from some academic lab with some esoteric application.
“The GPU is a powerful, programmable platform that is perfect for computing applications such as seismic processing for oil and gas exploration, computing in bioscience, and financial modeling,” says Andy Keane, general manager of the GPU computing business at NVIDIA, a pioneer in using GPUs for HPC. “The GPU will change the way engineers and researchers approach these problems.”
Modern graphics processing units (GPUs) contain hundreds of arithmetic units and can be harnessed to provide tremendous acceleration for many numerically intensive scientific applications. The key to effective utilization of GPUs for scientific computing