GPGPUs

[Russel Winder]

The era of GPGPUs for Bitcoin mining are now over, they moved to ASICs.
The new market for GPGPUs is likely the banks, and other "Big Data"
folk. True many of the banks are already doing some GPGPU usage, but it
is not big as yet. But it is coming.

Most of the banks are either reinforcing their JVM commitment, via
Scala, or are re-architecting to C++ and Python. True there is some
C#/F# but it is all for terminals not for strategic computing, and it is
diminishing (despite what you might hear from .NET oriented training
companies).

Currently GPGPU tooling means C. OpenCL and CUDA (if you have to) are C
API for C coding. There are some C++ bindings. There are interesting
moves afoot with the JVM to enable access to GPGPU from Java, Scala,
Groovy, etc. but this is years away, which is a longer timescale than
the opportunity.

Python's offerings, PyOpenCL and PyCUDA are basically ways of managing C
coded kernels which rather misses the point. I may get involved in
trying to write an expression language in Python to go with PyOpenCL so
that kernels can be written in Python – a more ambitious version aimed
at Groovy is also mooted.

However, D has the opportunity of gaining a bridgehead if a combination
of D, PyD, QtD and C++ gets to be seen as a viable solid platform for
development.  The analogue here is the way Java is giving way to Scala
and Groovy, but in an evolutionary way as things all interwork. The
opportunity is for D to be seen as the analogue of Scala on the JVM for
the native code world: a language that interworks well with all the
other players on the platform but provides more.

The entry point would be if D had a way of creating GPGPU kernels that
is better than the current C/C++ + tooling.

This email is not a direct proposal to do work, just really an enquiry
to see if there is any interest in this area.
-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/digitalmars-d/attachments/20130813/932fb101/attachment.pgp>