OpenCL 1.0 Spec Released

An API for cross-platform, parallel programming


December 09, 2008
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/open-source/opencl-10-spec-released/212300363


The Khronos Group has announced the ratification and public release of the OpenCL 1.0 specification, the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors found in PCs, servers and handheld/embedded devices. OpenCL (short for "Open Computing Language") improves speed and responsiveness for a wide spectrum of applications in numerous market categories from gaming and entertainment to scientific and medical software.

Proposed six months ago as a draft specification by Apple, OpenCL has been developed and ratified by industry-leading companies including 3DLABS, Activision Blizzard, AMD, Apple, ARM, Barco, Broadcom, Codeplay, Electronic Arts, Ericsson, Freescale, HI, IBM, Intel Corporation, Imagination Technologies, Kestrel Institute, Motorola, Movidia, Nokia, NVIDIA, QNX, RapidMind, Samsung, Seaweed, TAKUMI, Texas Instruments and Umea University.

For instance, NVIDIA is among the first to announce support for the API that lets developers harness the massively parallel computing power of the GPU.

CUDA, NVIDIA's massively parallel computing ISA and hardware architecture that's designed to natively support all parallel computing interfaces, will seamlessly run OpenCL. CUDA provides performance boosts across a wide range of applications and provides an installed base for the deployment of compute applications using OpenCL.

"The OpenCL specification is a result of a clearly recognized opportunity from leaders like NVIDIA to grow the total market for heterogeneous parallel computing through an open, cross-platform standard," said Neil Trevett, vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. He added that "NVIDIA will continue to be very active in the OpenCL working group to drive the evolution of the specification and will support OpenCL on all its platforms, providing developers an additional way to tap into the awesome computational power of our GPUs."

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