In the beginning of 2012 I spoke with Patrick Viry, former CEO of Ateji – now out-of-business. We shared ideas on GPGPU, OpenCL and programming in general. While talking about the strengths of his product, he came with a remark which I found important and interesting: separation of transfer. This triggered me to think further – those were the times when you could not read on modern computing, but had to define it yourself.
Separation of focus-areas are known to increase effectiveness, but are said to be for experts only. I disagree completely – the big languages just don’t have good support for defining the separations of concerns.
For example, the concepts of loops is well-known to all programmers, but OpenCL and CUDA have broken with that. Instead of using huge loops, those languages describe what has to be done at one location in the data and what the data is to be processed. From what I see, this new type of loop is getting abandoned in higher level languages, while it is a good design pattern.
I would like to discuss separation of compute and transfer from the rest of the code, to show that this will improve the quality of code. Continue reading “Separation of Compute and Transfer from the rest of the code.”
With the launch of twitter-channel 
There is a lot going on at the path to GPGPU 2.0 – the libraries on top of OpenCL and/or CUDA. Among many solutions we see for example Microsoft with C++ AMP on top of DirectCompute, NVidia (and more) with OpenACC, and now 
We zoom into the slower bus-speeds. So all the good stuff is at the left and all buses to avoid are on the right. What should be clear is that a read from or write to a SSD will make the software very slow if you use write-trough instead of write-back.
Does your computer have OpenCL-capable hardware? Read on and find out if your computer is compatible…
HTML5 has the future, now Flash and Silverlight are abandoning the market to make the way free for HTML5-video. There is one big problem and that is that it is hard to protect the content – before you know the movie is on the free market. DRM is only a temporary solution and many times ends in user-frustration who just want to see the movie wherever they want.
Typos are a programmers worst nightmare, as they are bad for concentration. The code in your head is not the same as the code on the screen and therefore doesn’t have much to do with the actual problem solving. Code highlighting in the IDE helps, but better is to use the actual OpenCL compiler without running your whole software: an Online OpenCL Compiler. In short is just an OpenCL-program with a variable kernel as input, and thus uses the compilers of Intel, AMD, NVidia or whatever you have installed to try to compile the source. I have found two solutions, which both have to be built from source – so a C-compiler is needed.
In the series 
