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BrookGPU: General Purpose Programming on GPUs

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the bump-maps-make-me-giggle dept.

An anonymous reader writes " BrookGPU is a compiler and runtime system that provides an easy, C-like programming environment (read: No GPU programming experience needed) for today's GPUs. A shader program running on the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra achieves over 20 GFLOPS, roughly equivalent to a 10 GHz Pentium 4. Combine this with the increased memory bandwidth, 25.3 GB/sec peak compared to the Pentium 4's 5.96 GB/sec peak, and you've got a seriously fast compute engine but programming them has been a real pain. BrookGPU adds simple data parallel language additions to C which allow programmers to specify certain parts of their code to run on the GPU. The compiler and runtime takes care of the rest. Here is the Project Page and Sourceforge page."

5 of 275 comments (clear)

  1. first link is incorrect by 2.246.1010.78 · · Score: 5, Informative

    but the link to the project page is correct.

  2. Re:wait a minute by the+uNF+cola · · Score: 5, Informative

    You are assuming using the GPU technologies are possible in a CPU. Because something is applicable in one instance doesn't mean it is in all instances. Making some things efficient may take away from the efficiency of others, but in the case of such aa specialized chip, it may not matter.

    It may be ok to compare the speed of a GPU and a CPU if they are infact different. If a GPU was a CPU used with cheaper material, yeah, it would be unfair. But as life goes, they both have their merits.. so why not? A GPU is prolly best at some matrix math transforms.. or not. :)

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    "I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo

  3. Re:How does this look? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Nope. Nothing appears on your screen until the contents of the area of memory known as the "frame buffer" are rewritten by a program (on either the GPU or CPU). The GPU can execute math code all day and you won't see the results unless it deliberately modifies the frame buffer.

  4. Re:wait a minute by Entropy_ajb · · Score: 5, Informative

    Because CPUs are limited to running instructions (for the most part) in serial. GPUs get to run a large number of instructions in parallel. As some above posts mentioned, a lot of the stuff the GPU can do is vector and matrix multiplication, therefore the GPU is really good at multiplying a lot of numbers times a lot of numbers at once. But in everyday life you aren't multiplying a bunch of number times a bunch of numbers at once, you are multiplying one number time another, then multiplying the result times a number, and so on. GPUs are built to a specific task, and at that task they are very fast, but outside that task they won't be able to compete with a real CPU. And on top of all of that I can buy 3 2.4Ghz P4s for the price of a Geforce FX5950.

  5. Re:Fast Fourier Transform by jonsmirl · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.cs.unm.edu/~kmorel/documents/fftgpu/

    The FFT on a GPU
    This page contains supplemental material for the following paper.

    Moreland, K and Angel, E. "The FFT on a GPU." In SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware 2003 Proceedings, pp. 112-119, July 2003.