AMD GPGPU solutions get extra support from industry partners

Wednesday 11th June 2008, 12:03:00 AM, written by Rys

A couple of companies producing software solutions that target the GPU and CPU for general purpose programming acceleration have announced partnerships with AMD.

RapidMind is the more well-known of the two, with a recent press release highlighting support for RV670 in their Multi-Core Development Platform.  The software platform lets developers developer write-once, run-many applications accelerated by a range of multi-core processors that their runtime can target.

In the press release, Patricia Harrell, AMD Director of Stream Computing -- surely one of the more interesting positions in the industry at large right now -- makes note that the platform targets both AMD CPUs and GPUs.  Multi-socket, multi-core Opteron, and multi-GPU Radeon or FireStream with RapidMind layered on top would certainly be one of the more interesting development platforms right now.  Outfitted with upcoming Radeon products, it'd be possible to easily build single machines with those components that feature peak floating point rates in the 2Tflop+ range for single precision, with leading single-box DP rates on top via both GPU and CPU.

FireStream 9170 is mentioned, and it's a product we've talked about in the recent past.  With the advent of Linux support for the AMD Stream SDK, AMD look to be beefing up their high performance compute offerings with as much of their product stack as they can.  A renewed push from the company in that respect wouldn't go amiss.

The second press release is from Rogue Wave, a supplier of C++ components for high-performance computing.  They're partnering with AMD to provide support for components that accelerate financial analysis codes, now via the GPU, presumably by way of the Stream SDK.

Patricia pops up again to talk about the cross-platform nature of the partnership, with the software running on CPU and GPU alike, and Rogue Wave's CEO has a sound-bite about being able to accelerate codes with different parallel processors without rewriting anything.  The RapidMind approach seems like a popular one, and indeed we wonder if Rogue Wave uses their platform.

The repeated talk about running codes unmodified on both CPU and GPU seems to be a nice hint as to a future direction the company might well take with their computing products.  A heterogeneous system where you have different processor architectures able to contribute to acceleration of general codes is seriously attractive to the software developer.

Not having to write separate code for any particular architecture, while still having multiple architectures available, each good at accelerating a different general class of codes, has definite advantages. Unifying execution and providing transparent resource management there seems a desirable direction for AMD to eventually take.

You can find the press releases below.

RapidMind Multi-Core Development Platform and AMD
AMD and Rogue Wave

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amd ± heterogenous, platform, cpu, gpu, opteron, radeon, teraflops, rapidmind, rogue, wave

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