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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. Cool ... by torpor · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ... can you say 'software synthesists' wet dream?

    Oh, suddenly, that 'game investment' also gives you a few 100 extra voices of polyphony?

    Sweet ... $5 to the first person to use Brooke to make a synthesizer. :)

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  2. wait a minute by Janek+Kozicki · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A shader program running on the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra achieves over 20 GFLOPS, roughly equivalent to a 10 GHz Pentium 4.

    wait, if there is a technology that allows construction of GPU that is 3 times faster than the fastest CPUs, why Intel and AMD do not use this technology to build those 3times faster CPUs?

    are you sure that you can compare the speed of GPU and CPU?

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    1. Re:wait a minute by barik · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Are you sure that you can compare the speed of GPU and CPU?

      Professor Pat Hanrahan, of Stanford University, made a stab at answering this question in his presentation 'Why is Graphics Hardware so Fast?'. The first half of the presentation focuses on this question, while the second half of the presentation covers programming languages that utilitize this hardware. Specifically, the Stanford Real-Time Shading Language (RTSL) and Brook are discussed. Overall, it's a good presentation that should get you up to speed with the basics of what's happening in this area of research.

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      Titus Barik
  3. How does this look? by adrianbaugh · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm completely new to meddling with graphics card, so apologies if this is a silly question: when programs utilising the GPU for arbitrary calculations are running does the screen go weird, or is there a way of stopping the output being displayed? A screenfull of junk might not matter to a scientist leaving their computer to crunch numbers for a few months but it wouldn't be good for a general-purpose program.

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  4. I am not an EE, but... by unfortunateson · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It would seem to me that the GPU is not going to be as general-purpose as the CPU, but could still attain the high mathematical throughput with vector-oriented processing.

    Doing string searches, complex logic analyses, etc. would probably suck, but big data manipulations, such as SETI-style wave transformations, molecular analysis, etc., might be able to take advantage of them.

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