How is parallel stuff going

[Abubakar]

Hi,
there are some concurrency frameworks available for .net from microsoft,
which takes advantage of the cpu. But recently GPUs have broken the 1 tera
flop barrier and are really ideal for parallel computing. For example
Nvidia's CUDA allows us to program the GPU. My question: is there any effort
going inside microsoft that would give us (the devs) some framework, which
wraps up the functionality of CUDA (or similar technology from amd/ati) and
we program through those special APIs that gets our parallel code executed
inside the gpu rather then tha cpu.

regards,

...ab

 

[Nicholas Paldino [.NET/C# MVP]]

Abubakar,

I imagine the answer is not yet. My understanding is that there is not
a standardized way to access the GPUs yet, so having any solution would be
provider-specific, and that's not really going to help in creating a
framework which will address a number of different GPUs.

I imagine that OpenCL is a step in this direction, and it's something
that you might want to consider using in .NET, if you have hardware that
supports it.

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

there are some concurrency frameworks available for .net from microsoft,
which takes advantage of the cpu. But recently GPUs have broken the 1 tera
flop barrier and are really ideal for parallel computing. For example
Nvidia's CUDA allows us to program the GPU. My question: is there any effort
going inside microsoft that would give us (the devs) some framework, which
wraps up the functionality of CUDA (or similar technology from amd/ati) and
we program through those special APIs that gets our parallel code executed
inside the gpu rather then tha cpu.

You can always build a Win32 DLL from some C code and access
that from C#.

Google finds stuff like:

http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?type=technical report&id=1040
http://research.microsoft.com/Resea...09e1-cb85-46c4-9a94-3cca55971b1d/Details.aspx

and

http://brahma.ananthonline.net/

which you could try out.

Arne

 

[Andrei Varanovich [C# MVP]]

Hello Abubakar,

I believe F# in a step in this direction. I think functional approach is
much clear than imperative for these parallel stuff; and as soon as we don't
have any mainstream functional language from Microsoft I wouldn't expect
anything really usefull.

Kind regards,
Andrei Varanovich [C# MVP]