More on GPU's: RapidMind

[Bill Baxter]

Craig Black wrote:
> Has anyone looked at The RapidMind Development Platform?  They have 
> created a C++ library that allows programmers to write C++ code that 
> runs on a GPU. It's also being extended to take advantage of multi-cores 
> as well.  I've been browsing the docs.  It seems about as clean as it 
> gets for a C++ library that provides such an exotic capability.  They 
> seem to keep everything very high level, and they have different 
> backends.  Currently they support IBM's Cell processor and GLSL.  To me, 
> this is an ideal kind of design for something like this.  Kudos to them.
> 
> As nice as this library seems, I'm sure a D implementation could be much 
> better.  Anyway, I really think that this is a very, very important 
> arena to pursue for D.
> 

Like I said in another thread, RapidMind is an extension/evolution of 
the open software research project called Sh.  That would be a good 
place to look for more implementation details if the RapidMind source 
code is not easy to obtain.  Sh is really meant for writing nifty 
looking visual shaders, but the basic idea is the same -- take an 
algorithmic description in C++, metaprogram it to death, and out pops 
on-the-fly generated GPU shader programs on the other end.

With RapidMind they've apparently generalized it to work for other back 
ends, but I would bet the core ideas used in both are the same.

And in any event, even if RapidMind in D is too big a project, something 
like Sh in D would still be a nice demo of D's power.  If it doesn't 
come to a grinding halt because of symbol length limitations in OPTLINK. 
  :-)

--bb