OpenCL: Imagine Lotus Notes 9 built with the 'Star Wars: The Force Unleased' engine.
by Steve Tsuida, June 16
Ten second version: The things that make your kids' game console do so much, will soon help your work computer do it's thing faster too–on the cheap–by letting everything in the OS—not just whizzy graphics—put your video card to work.
Software vendors, you are now listening to the sound of my voice, and only the sound of my voice. You are feeling relaxed, light, and open to suggestion. When you leave this page you will visit the developers' brief on Snow Lopard, one of the nex-gen desktop and server operating systems that will implement OpenCL, the Open Computing Language at a foundational level and let us use all those spare cycles in our ridiculously overpowered but dirt cheap video cards. You will recompile your Portal server software and other productivity software to run on OS's who license OpenCL so that our low-end desktop machines, and affordable blade servers can be reborn as fire-breathing monsters. At the count of three you will wake up, feel refreshed, and ready to implement OpenCL in all of our server software. One, two, three.
Giant robot warriors mock my PDF export progress bar.
Have you ever watched your kids (or nieces and nephews) play a video game and wonder why their cheap little console seems capable of so much more computing performance than your big expensive desktop is? Wow, Master Chief just blew up a Covenant tank full of big alien bad guys, and the screen filled with glowing embers all bouncing independently according to the laws of physics as the backdrop fills with accurately lit volumetric smoke, meanwhile my [expletive] thirty page Word document is almost finished exporting to PDF. What gives?
Force equals math times accelleration.
What gives is market economics and exotic mathematics. Video games are an enormous market driven entirely by greed and math. The machines with the fastest math can deliver better games, which bring in more money for the developers and the chip vendors. There's a cutthroat arms-race for power and affordability in the graphical processor unit (GPU) market with many billions of dollars up for grabs. Like every arms race, there are some wonderful spill-over benefits for ordinary people. (I'm so kidding: nukes are bad, guns are bad, be nice to each other!)
Teraflops are wasted on the young.
OpenCL is a new layer for desktop and server operating systems that will let grown-up software like Office, Portal and Notes access that huge reserve of video game computing power that's been sleeping inside your ordinary laptop; power that's ramped up and priced down by the games arms race. Tapping the GPU's reserves has been done on a case-by case basis before, but OpenCL and it's variants are a huge jump past that because the science of GPU-offloading is now elegantly baked into the OS, meaning all software written to spec will have access to the GPU without the author having to learn exotic GPU kung-fu. Hello World will run at mach five.
And you care, because...
A year ago, to host a really robust web application you'd want to buy an enormous and expensive server, which really meant you'd have to pay someone with an enormous and expensive server to host your site. OpenCL promises a world where you could buy a bag full of little blade servers–with inexpensive GPUs thrown in for good measure–and enjoy the same power with the luxury and flexibility of ownership.
