GPUs and Array Operations

[Bill Baxter]

Don Clugston wrote:
> Lutger wrote:
>> Craig Black wrote:
>>> Another idea.  What if this could be done using the recently added 
>>> mixin feature?  Then you could use a shading language directly rather 
>>> than trying to convert D code to a shading language.  I've never used 
>>> mixins, so I can't even think of how the syntax would look.  Is this 
>>> a practical idea?
>>>
>>> -Craig
>>
>> A solution like Blade* should be possible, especially when D gets some 
>> macro syntactic sugar, but somewhat involved probably.
> 
> It's certainly possible. It might not be too terrible, actually. I'm 
> rewriting BLADE for the D conference; it now has syntax like:
> 
> import blade;
> 
> void main()
> {
> real result[]; double b[];
> alias b c;
> const x = 8.9884;
> real y = 234543;
> mixin(VEC("result+=b*3.5645 - x*43645*3124.543 +c[2..18]*y"));
> }
> 
> By analyzing the complexity of the expression, it's possible to 
> determine if
> it can easily be done with SSE1, SSE2, or x87, and if not, just do it 
> with straight D instead. This is nice, because it means you don't have 
> to worry about  tricky cases. Using a mixin instead of operator 
> overloading means you can detect aliasing. The same thing could be done 
> for a GPU.
> In fact, the examples in NVIDIA's CUDA programming guide are perfect for 
> BLADE, except that they aren't in C!
> 
> Do you know where I could find some examples of using a GPU to do 
> calculations (using standard C)?
> I think it would be easy to get BLADE to do it for a few simple cases.

Have you looked at GPGPU.org?
They have forums there too.  Don't know if they're still active, but 
used to be several of the pioneers of GPGPU would hang out there.

But is it that hard to translate the core bits of the code samples back 
into C?

--bb