GPUs and Array Operations

[Bill Baxter]

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. Converting D to a 
> shading language does seem what you want for more general purpose 
> computation. Nvidia has made a compiler specifically to do this in C, 
> called Cuda.
> 
> 
> * http://www.dsource.org/projects/mathextra/browser/trunk/blade

I was going to write a comment about Sh and how it used C++ and 
metaprogramming to trick shader programs into being compiled along with 
the rest of your source code, but apparently the RapidMind thing that 
was mentioned here a while ago is precisely the (commercial) evolution 
of Sh into more generic uses:


"""
As you are likely aware, Sh started from years of research at the 
University of Waterloo. In 2004, RapidMind Inc. (Serious Hack Inc. at 
the time) was formed to commercialize this research, which continued to 
maintain Sh leading to the currently released version. The people behind 
Sh felt strongly that the fruits of publicly-sponsored research should 
be open sourced. Our development has now shifted to be commercially 
based, and we are currently working on releasing the RapidMind 
Development Platform, which has roots in Sh but signifies significant 
leaps beyond it, such as more general-purpose applicability and support 
for non-GPU processors such as the Cell Broadband Engine.
"""
-- http://libsh.org/index.html


http://www.rapidmind.net/software.php

--bb